Guest vois2 Posted September 17, 2007 Report Share Posted September 17, 2007 Hello -- I have a good bit of experience with Linux desktop distributions on the x86 architecture. Now it is my task to decide on a desktop distro for someone's iMac, 500 MHz PowerPC G3 with 640 MB of RAM. My initial investigation led me here. I have a few questions: . (1) Given the more aged processor, which version of free-cost Mandriva desktop distribution would you recommend ? (2) I would need an installer which is more than clickable -- rather, I would need (my preference) some sort of text installer where I have a great deal of control over partitioning. Is this available? (3) I would need to be able to install a bootloader which has a lot of online docs or support, so that I can modify that bootloader. How does bootloader for Mandriva work in this regard? Easy? (4) I would need some sort of partition manager "live CD" so that I could shrink the existing OS X partition on the iMac in question, before beginning an install of any Linux distro. What is recommended? Thanks very much for reading, I hope you can make some recommendations for me to move me forward with Mandriva. vois2 firefighter @ graffiti. n e t Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 17, 2007 Report Share Posted September 17, 2007 Welcome, Vois. :) To be honest: I wouldn't use Mandriva on a G3 as it ain't officially supported and the last ppc discs that were released were those for 2005LE and you had to tweak things in order to get the yaboot to work all. I have a G3, too, and I put Debian on it. It is the best option for such an "ancient" machine imho. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoonma Posted September 17, 2007 Report Share Posted September 17, 2007 Hi vois, I'd recommend Yellow Dog Linux, a distro tailored for PPC systems from the start. Download mirrors are here: http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/resources/downloads.shtml A very useful live CD for (re-)partitioning is GPartEd, but you should check HFS filesystem features before: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php HTH, scoonma Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mhn Posted September 18, 2007 Report Share Posted September 18, 2007 I don't know which is the best, but, like Arctic, I installed Debian on my G3 and it worked very well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted September 18, 2007 Report Share Posted September 18, 2007 Yellow Dog is commercial I think... or not? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoonma Posted September 18, 2007 Report Share Posted September 18, 2007 Yellow Dog is commercial I think... or not? Not fully. There are commercial versions, but a free download version, too. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted September 18, 2007 Report Share Posted September 18, 2007 yep. honestly, I'd go with YDL, Debian or Ubuntu on PowerPC. Mandriva's PPC port is only erratically updated any more and really isn't of much interest unless you're a dedicated Mandriva fan. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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