Installing Panther over YDL, wiping YDL completely?

[michaelsanford]

I'm soon to get a little G3 Graphite iBook, and will have to wait some time for my 256 ram upgrade to arrive (separate retailer). In that time I was considering familiarizing myself with YDL, since I'm already very comfortable with RedHat which I have installed on a few other machines.

My question: if I install YDL on my iBook, then later decide to put Panther on it, will I encounter any problems removing YDL and wiping the HD clean for Panther?

(I ask because once I installed RedHat 9 on my old Dell 200MHz, I was unable to boot to CD, unable to use a bootloader CD to run the Windows installation to restore the system (not my choice of course ) but alas was completely unable to reformat the HD and, more importantly, the master boot record...)

 

[Gurnox]

I don't have a great deal of knowledge about the Yellow Dog distro in particular. But I can't see any reason why it would cause a problem with being overwritten by OSX. If the worst came to the worst, you could always use Disk Druid or Fdisk to delete the Linux partitions before you install OSX.

When you install YDL, you might do well to check out the Ximian Desktop and it's accompanying suite of programs (Again, not sure if it'll compile under YDL 'cos I'm not too familiar with the distro). You might find that you don't want OS-X after all ;-)

Incidentally, you could have cleared your MBR with a windows 98 or MSDOS => 5 boot floppy by issuing the command:

fdisk /MBR

Good luck with Linux!

I'm soon to get a little G3 Graphite iBook, and will have to wait some time for my 256 ram upgrade to arrive (separate retailer). In that time I was considering familiarizing myself with YDL, since I'm already very comfortable with RedHat which I have installed on a few other machines.

My question: if I install YDL on my iBook, then later decide to put Panther on it, will I encounter any problems removing YDL and wiping the HD clean for Panther?

(I ask because once I installed RedHat 9 on my old Dell 200MHz, I was unable to boot to CD, unable to use a bootloader CD to run the Windows installation to restore the system (not my choice of course ) but alas was completely unable to reformat the HD and, more importantly, the master boot record...)

 

[michaelsanford]

fdisk /MBR hmm, should have thought of that. But right now I've convinced the computer's previous owner that RH runs a lot faster and better than Windows would anyway, so that problem solved itself...

Thanks!

 

[bluehz]

You will have no problems after using YDL. As a matter of fact you can even make a dual boot OS X/YDL install. I used to have my iBook setup like that. I don't seem to remember either system seeing teh other's partition when it was running, but supposedly you can set it up to do that, and theoretically you can even run OS X apps while booted into YDL using MOL (Mac On Linux) which is included with YDL. I was never able to get it to work though. If you have just YDL on your drive you will want to wipe/format the disk before installing Panther. Matter of fact I doubt teh disk will be seen for installation before you do that.

 

[michaelsanford]

... as soon as Sirius downloads, I'm going to attempt to install it on my iBook, awaiting Panther's arrival (or maybe not )