I have installed many a distro in my time, but last week, I decided to go up against my biggest challenge yet...Linux for the PPC. I pulled out the old box (very old...a 7200/75 machine, which is from 1995), and PURHCASED a copy of LinuxPPC. I proceeded to go through the install steps...Little did I know I had killed my partition table and made my second HDD (4 gigs) unusable. During testing, I also bent a HD pin yanking in and out a SCSI cable, rendering the HDD further unusable. So I had no idea what was going on...I figured that somehting bad was happening. I eventually figured out the pin problem (corrected with an exacto knife) and formatted the Hard Drive, and also decided to reinstall MacOS. My first install attempt, having left the drivers in this time went pretty ba. It started off okay, then the computer rebooted itself halfway through. Second attempt froze the computer. Getting panicky, I tried a third time. Now the computer was unable to boot from CD into X, had to go into a debilitated text mode where I could do nothing. I figured something was wrong, so I tried it maybe 10 more times. Results were mixed. Sometimes, the computer was unable to boot from CD, other times, the computer would boot into text mode, giving me dozens upon dozens of errors relating to the CD.

So, I tried a different distro. Having had success w/ Mandrake in the past (who hasn't), I decided to go with their new distro. I dl'ed it and burned it. No juice...Mandrake wouldn't recognize my CD drive (which it happened to be booting off of...Very bizarre). A frantic search through mailing list archives showed I needed to load a particular CD driver. I do this, it recognizes my CD, then it Kernel Panics. Ouch. I manage to install BootX in this process, though, so that will help later. I try a third distro, Yellow Dog Linux, which again pledged support for the 7200 series. Nope. No luck with YDL, it fails to recognize the CD drive and doesn't even give me the option of loading a driver.

So, I go back to LinuxPPC. I figure that the CD is bad, and download the install disc. Try to burn it to CD. "EZ piece of crap creator" doesn't recognize it. I take a successful educated guess (For once...), and figure thats cause of the FS on the iso. So I download a free trial of Nero, which (thank goodness) supports the iso FS, HFS. So I burn it and reinstall. Maybe 190/330 packages through the install, it crashes on me. Crashes on install of control-center. This is where I am right now. I'm gonna let it sit for a while, b/c I figure control-center might be kinda big...

So I'm wondering...Have I had the worst experience with Linux ever?

"If you teach a child to read, then he or her will be able to pass a literacy test" - George W.

Wow...I've never heard anything so bad in my life...

Don't pay any attention to my chickenscratch.

Yup...I just finished an "install", with nothing but Networking Support, X, and the scantest of utils...Unfortunately, I cannot boot into Linux. I am going to bed, maybe I will have more luck with this tomorrow. I might need to uninstall X and go all text based. How fun

"If you teach a child to read, then he or her will be able to pass a literacy test" - George W.

yeah man that's pretty bad.

i had a bad run with mklinux on a 7100 this one time, but nothing like what you just went through.

on a more serious note, you sure you want to even run that box in it's current state? sounds like somethings up with it. maybe it just wants it's p-ram cleared?

good luck anyways.

I finally got it woring...But I think it messed up my X install so I will have to install that again. I can get to a command prompt, but cannot get X started successfully. I will keep working on it.

"If you teach a child to read, then he or her will be able to pass a literacy test" - George W.

Project complete.
X installed, GNOME installed, Samba installed and configured. Old Mac now sitting on my left with no monitor or keyboard, serving as a secure Samba server.

"If you teach a child to read, then he or her will be able to pass a literacy test" - George W.

Jeez dude...guess a congratulations is in order! Sounds like your persistence paid off!

Catheter and Caffeine IV are in place. Let's PLAY.