[Novalug] MAC mini PPC and Ubuntu

Mark A. Metz mametz@aol.com
Wed Jan 25 19:52:23 EST 2012


Matt's advice is very sound.  I booted my G4 with a Live CD and could 
"see" the drive (even the installation routine could recognize the 
drive), but I couldn't complete a successful install until I partitioned 
the drive.  I installed GParted to RAM with the Live CD then partitioned 
the drive.  Once I partitioned the drive, the installation routine 
completed successfully.  This was with a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Live CD that I 
downloaded from here: 
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/lucid/release/

If you can't recognize the drive from a Live CD, I wouldn't remove the 
current OS without a back up plan.  I do not have an old OSX disk lying 
around at home, but I can probably get my hands on one.  And there are a 
number of Apple people on the list.  What OS is on there now?  Panther? 
Jaguar? Tiger?

As an alternate plan, I think you started this adventure needing a 
computer for your daughter.  I have an older Sony multimedia desktop 
(P4, I think) that would do the trick if you have a monitor, keyboard, 
etc.  I planned to toy with Myth on this machine, but I'll likely not 
get to it.  I can donate this to you, or we can make a trade of some 
kind. ; )  It already has MythUbuntu on it, but you could load whatever 
the hardware could take.



On 01/25/2012 05:38 PM, Matt Ryanczak wrote:
> fwiw i'm very skeptical that any OSX specific disk formatting (GUID,
> etc) would cause Linux to not see the disk at all. Before you go
> overwriting things you might check to see if Linux even sees the disk
> controller. something like:
>
>> matt@bender:~/lspci | grep -i -e sata -e ide
>> 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
>> 05:00.0 SATA controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB362 AHCI Controller (rev 10)
>> 09:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9172 SATA 6Gb/s Controller (rev 11)
> If you don't see a disk controller of some sort you are not going to see
> a disk. I've done a bit of Linux on apple hw in the past, I've seen
> unsupported controllers... worth checking imho.
>
>
> On 01/25/2012 05:25 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
>> okay, silly question, but i reckoned there'd be some sort of linux live
>> disk that i could use to boot the unit.  then i'd get a shell and destroy
>> the first couple of sectors of the disk drive and then continue on to
>> install the system normally.  of course, in retrospect, if i had a live
>> disk for my mac then the install would work w/o having to destroy the
>> apple os partition in the first place.  ;-)
>>
>> so, i guess i can boot into macosx and then run dd over my hard drive or
>> fdisk or similar, or i can boot from a macosx rescue disk and then do
>> the same.  i'm a bit afraid though as that's a one way ticket.  if the
>> partition type idea fails then i still can't install and i'm also left
>> w/o a macosx.  apple is not supporting macosx on g4 any longer so i
>> might be stuck.
>>
>> do you happen to know any live images that i can use to access the disk?
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 03:59:45PM -0500, Mark A. Metz wrote:
>>> I think you'll have to remove the Apple OS partition table with the live image or GParted first.
>>> I think it will work unpartitioned.
>>>
>>> Mark Smith<mark@winksmith.com>   wrote:
>>>
>>> i tried an 11.10 install last night. after a couple of false starts
>>> i was able to boot from a usb key and everything looked keen until i
>>> reached the disk partition section. no hard disks were represented.
>>> i booted back to macosx and lo and behold my disk was there so obviously
>>> it's missing a driver or something. it's a standard ata disk bus so
>>> i'm not sure why it failed. google revealed nothing interesting.
>>>
>>> anyway, i'll give debian 6.0.3 a go tonight unless something else comes
>>> to mind.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 02:46:59PM +1300, Mark Smith wrote:
>>>> Hey... I was gonna buy my daughter a smallish desktop computer for her
>>>> room, but then i remembered that i had a MAC mini (one of the older
>>>> PPC varieties). I had originally purchased it due to its size and
>>>> noiselessness; both of these features will be helpful here too. It's
>>>> not the latest and greatest, but for her needs it should be completely
>>>> adequate.
>>>>
>>>> I looked it up for Ubuntu and it turns out that it's supported in a
>>>> fashion. I have 32b PPC for 11.10 and 11.04. At least it's way better
>>>> supported than by Apple!
>>>>
>>>> I found the right images to try and I found some documentation to help
>>>> me along. Has anyone given this a go? or has some additional comments
>>>> regarding this platform/os combination?
>>> --
>>> Mark Smith
>>> mark@winksmith.com
>>> mark@tux.org
>>> _____________________________________________
>>>
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