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craiggiles
02-27-2006, 07:19 PM
Right, I currently have several Mac's I currently use.
One of which is a Power Macintosh 7200/90, and its currently running Mac OS 8.6 and being used as a Web/File Server, which is good and stable but getting long in the tooth and nothing supports it anymore after all it was released in 1999.
So I am wondering if anyone on here has ever installed Linux onto a PowerPC machine. Or if they know of any Linux distro that can be installed onto an OldWorld Mac with a Graphical install with a lowish amount of memory? Something like the equivilent of Vector Linux on the x86 platform?
Specs of the Machine are as follows: 90Mhz PowerPC 601 CPU, 64Mb FPRAM, 10Gb SCSI HD, ATi Rage Pro 16Mb GFX Card.
Ta
Craig
dkeav
02-27-2006, 08:26 PM
you will need a very small install of macos 8 will be fine, and as minimal as possible to run a program called BootX for you, then i would just install debian, if its that low on specs and is used as a server you really have no need to waste memory on a graphical environment
My Old PowerPC 2600/?? was able to run a Redhat based system, and Windowmaker for a desktop. It ran fairly well actually. I got it on the internet with mozilla, and got it to play some mp3s with XMMS. If I can get it to work on a 2600, your 7200 should do fine. Go read up, and see if there are any howtos for that model of Mac. The hardest part I had with getting Linux on a Mac was finding someone with the Mac utilities to get the file system made
rdeschene2
02-27-2006, 10:23 PM
I have no experience with Macs or Yellow Dog Linux. That said, I THINK Yellow Dog Linux is one of the few, classic PowerMac distros. It appears that Oregon State still has version 2.3 available, which (from what I can see) was a mid-2002 release - a close vintage to your hardware. The site also seems to have updates for at least some packages.
ftp://ftp.oregonstate.edu/pub/ydl/
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/resources/ftp_mirrors.shtml
Good luck,
Rick D.
dkeav
02-28-2006, 12:13 AM
wouldnt that defeat the purpose of upgrading to linux, why run old software
Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379
03-02-2006, 04:48 AM
Debian works just fine on that platform, and it's updated :cool:
mrBen
03-02-2006, 06:48 AM
/me is planning a Debian install on an old 8500/180 that I've been given :) I'll let you know how it goes.
/me is planning a Debian install on an old 8500/180 that I've been given :) I'll let you know how it goes.
I attempted to do that on a very similar machine but never succeeded. Partly because I think I had a damaged install of OS 8 and then couldn't get it to boot from the cd, adn well now box is in pieces:P
craiggiles
03-13-2006, 05:28 PM
I decided to give up on the install on the Power Mac 7200/90, it was just too old to run anything better than OS 9 even then it was slow.
I've now turned my attention to a Power Mac G3 266Mhz, recently purchased on eBay for 99p or $1.70.
I'm now currently faffing about to get YDL running on it aswell as Mac OS X 10.2 :).
i remember back when i was hunting around for a distro to use on my imac G233, i ran into debian ppc. it had some mighty useful documentation on how to install on new and old world macs
http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/
btw: if you imac 266 anything like my imac 233, then you're going to have a little difficulty getting your xserver to work if you use debian ppc. what i did was google someone else's xorg.config file and used it.
i ended up using fedora core 4 ppc because of the awesome hardware detection and setup for the new world macs.