On 5/17/06, steve szmidt <steve@szmidt.org> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 17 May 2006 20:28, michael hast wrote:
> > Hey, everybody!
> >
> > Well, my wife has been wanting a Mac for some time now. Good grief,
> > those things are expensive! Well, I didn't want to spring for a new one
> > and have her not like it or even be ho-hum about it, so I found her a
> > nice, used G4 to play with. Of course, in this household, there will be
> > some Linux time on that machine. It comes pre-loaded with OS 10.4 and a
> > bunch of Adobe software, but there are no disks with any of that. I
> > have an extra little hard drive that would work just fine for a
> > Yellowdog install, but I'm wondering if I can set up a dual-boot on it
> > between the two hard drives without screwing anything up.
> > Do any of you have experience in this area? What I have learned
> > from in my Googling is that Yellowdog likes to be on the first partition
> > on the first drive. I wonder if I could put the existing drive on the
> > other connector on the ribbon cable, re-jumper it as slave, slap the
> > other hard drive in, install YDL to it and call it a day. That sounds
> > like a really good way to wipe out several hundred dollars worth of
> > software to me! Anyway, any insight would be welcomed and cherished.
> > Thanks.
>
> Grub handles that easily. (Read the doc, it's pretty easy.)
>
> What you do is make the Linux box the first drive so that it can load grub
> and
> give you the dual boot choice.
>
> Then use the grub command to fool OSX to think it is the first drive. Just
> like you would with windows.
>
> This way you are not at all altering OSX and can dump linux later.
>
> This is one way of doing it:
>
> title Old2000Kernel
> rootnoverify (hd1,0)
> chainloader +1
>
> When you install Linux you don't even need to have the OSX drive
> connected.
> Though some installers are good with recognizing aother OS's and
> automatically add them to grub.
>
> If I'm not sure I just disable the other OS and do my Linux install.
>
> --
>
> Steve Szmidt
>
No, Michael said he bought a G4 Mac, and that would use yaboot as the
bootloader, not grub.
OS X can boot from firewire, so one solution would be to use Carbon Copy
Cloner to copy the OS X disk to a firewire disk, and then use the internal
drive for Linux.
OS X and Linux can live on the same hard drive. I've got an old G3 iMac
that I've installed Ubuntu and Debian on. I bought an external firewire
hard drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the OS X drive, then
re-formatted and partitioned the internal drive, then copied the OS X back.
I remember it was all a bit of a pain, but I learned a lot about
partitioning in the process.
The Ubuntu install went smooth except for the X configuration, which took a
bit of research to figure out. Later, I did a netinstall and replaced the
Ubuntu with Debian so I could use some newer versions of a few apps.
The newly released Suse 10.1 has install disks for PPC, and I think I will
try that on the iMac next. I put it on my Compaq and it was the easiest
install I've ever done, very slick.
One thing to keep in mind is that Flash, RealPlayer, and Java aren't
available for Linux on PPC.
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