BTW, I've installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my iMac G5 and save for two small issues, I was finally able to install it successfully. The first issue was that the optical drive was not detected upon bootup of the installation. That was solved by Alt-F2 to a command prompt and typing "modprobe -a ide-scsi", and once I hist Alt-F1 to go back to the installation, the installer was able to detect the optical drive after I chose the language and keyboard setup.
The second issue was post-installation where I needed to do the following:
- Type "video=ofonly nosplash" at the boot: prompt in yaboot. That got me to the login screen, where I was able to login.
- Launch a Terminal session after logging in.
- Type "sudo -s" to become root.
- Modify the "append=" line for the default boot option in /etc/yaboot.conf to read "quiet video=ofonly nosplash" (I added the nosplash option due to the fact that the boot splash does not work with XFS filesystems) and then save the /etc/yaboot.conf file.
- Type "ybin -v" to finalize the changes to yaboot.
Aside from that, everything was detected properly and even Compiz Fusion was working with my RADEON 9600 graphics on the iMac G5. The only side issue is my M-AUDIO MIDIsport 2x2 which requires the firmware to be loaded each time. I've installed the midisport-firmware package but udev isn't loading the script to load the firmware. Still working on that one.
