Installing Linux

qurtered

Registered
Hey folks. Here's what I've got.

iBook
OS - 10.2.8 & 9.2.2
G3 - 900mhz
684mb ram
anything else is probebly irelevant.

Anyway, here is the issue. I have a 5gig partition on my computer that I would LOVE to install RedHat or Mandrake on. The problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to do it. Could someone give me a hand or point me at a few threads that might help? I tried searching 'linux' and got a billion responses. Thanks in advance.

-Joey
 
qurtered said:
Hey folks. Here's what I've got.

iBook
OS - 10.2.8 & 9.2.2
G3 - 900mhz
684mb ram
anything else is probebly irelevant.

Anyway, here is the issue. I have a 5gig partition on my computer that I would LOVE to install RedHat or Mandrake on. The problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to do it. Could someone give me a hand or point me at a few threads that might help? I tried searching 'linux' and got a billion responses. Thanks in advance.

-Joey


If you don't know a damn thing about linux then go for Mandrake. Redhat is ok but I don't like it it's too buggy and I've gotten a bunch of kernel panics. The BEST two distros to check out would be SuSe and Gentoo linux. You won't have any problem with those two distros. I would recommend burning it on a cd or just buying a cd of one of those distros. It's easier to install and less painful :D
 
If you're gonna embark on the linux adventure, its worth checking out unix.com, a very friendly discussion forum with an osx/apple section. They should help answer all the questions you'll have. They also have forums for most of the major flavours.
ora
 
You can't install RedHat on your iBook because there's no PPC (PowerPC, what Macs are) release of that distro.

Download either YellowDog Linux, available from http://www.yellowdoglinux.com or Mandrake Linux, available from http://www.mandrake.com -- and be sure to download the PPC release. Burn the install disks onto CDs using Toast or a similar program. You can boot your machine from that CD by putting the CD in the drive and holding down 'c' when it starts up. The installer should load from there.

You may need to re-partition your drive -- I don't know if either of these Linux distros will recognize that one partition you have, since it's already been created by the Mac and probably formatted in HFS+ format. In addition, you'll need at least two (probably three) partitions to load Linux on -- the installer gives you the option of automatically partitioning the drive for Linux, but I don't know if it'll partition a Mac-formatted partition.

Both companies have good installer help online.
 
Mandrake has a good partitioning utility. You ought to be able to easily delete the spare 5 gig partition, and turn it into the two partitions you need for Linux, without touching the Mac partitions at all.

Anyway, it works that way installing in a PC that already has Windows or something installed, I don't see why it wouldn't work on a Mac
 
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