PPC Wired Networking

[Bro.Tiag]

That's the one B.T.!! I did not recall it being on these forums so didn't bother w/ a link to "someplace else".
Thanks
RP

Cheers

[LughClyde]

Update!

I tried Fedora 12 PPC and couldn't even get the install CD to fully run. It froze without any messages. (It looks like others have similar problems that no one is addressing in their forums.) Then I tried Gentoo and couldn't get it to boot successfully either. Next was Ubuntu 9.10 PPC. I got it to run and install. Even the networking worked on it. Alas, it seemed to be stuck with a very ugly 16 color mode with lots of dithering. I couldn't seem to get around that.

Then I tried FreeBSD. It would mostly install. It would go through all the motions and confuse itself at some point during the installation. I tried the net install version of it and couldn't get a complete download of anything. I gave up and tried NetBSD. It booted as well as Fedora. <sigh>

I thought I would try the net install version of Debian Squeeze. It booted, until some error got it running in a loop. Sorry, I didn't write it down.

Finally, I went back to Lenny and tried it's net install. It worked great! It booted fine, flawlessly went through the whole installation, AND everything works perfectly after the installation. One of the keys may be that the net install isn't using the same Network Manager. It also bothered to ask me which network interface I wanted to use: eth0 or firewire. I picked eth0 and it stuck with it. BTW, it set itself up through DHCP just fine too.

Yes, I still had to <Control><Option><F1> to bust out of the failed X11 startup and go edit my xorg.conf file. Once I did that, it ran fine. I'm not sure why this glaring screw up has never been fixed.

I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it seems like the best way to install Lenny on G3 PPC boxes is with the net install. I would recommend trying it anyway; it worked for me.

Thanks,
Clyde

[mikefreeman]

It probably isn't nice to ask here, but does anyone have a suggestion for a different distro that will run realiably and nicely as a desktop on an iMac?

I don't think anyone would care. We've all distro-hopped. Especially if Debian isn't working with your hardware. As for what you've written about, I'm not sure where your problem is coming from. I've personally installed Etch, Lenny, and Squeeze on my G3 iMac with only that annoying Xorg problem (not fun to boot to a black screen). No other problems. Networking has always worked fine out of the box. But my iMac doesn't have Firewire, so there may be some kind of conflict with that, as you said.

Other PPC distros are listed here: http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php

It says there is no longer "official" PPC support with Ubuntu, but there actually is a community PPC build of Ubuntu Karmic.

Good luck!

[onecallednick]

I know this is somewhat unrelated and I'll repost elsewhere if you think it's wise, but has anyone tried debian squeeze on an imac g3? I have a 500mhz early 2001 imac g3. I had debian lenny running smoothly, but got tired of iceweasel 3.0 and tried switching to squeeze from the sources.list. After the upgrades it froze (in a strange way, the mouse would show when i moved it but it would be just a blank screen) and after restarting it would show the login screen for a second, and then disappear, and then reappear to do the same thing a few moments later. Then I tried getting squeeze running from a netinstall cd, which installed but I couldn't find the xorg.conf file to modify properly! I looked in all the usual places but there didn't seem to be one.
So, long story short, has anyone gotten Squeeze running on a similar iMac?

[Bro.Tiag]

I know this is somewhat unrelated and I'll repost elsewhere if you think it's wise, but has anyone tried debian squeeze on an imac g3? I have a 500mhz early 2001 imac g3. I had debian lenny running smoothly, but got tired of iceweasel 3.0 and tried switching to squeeze from the sources.list. After the upgrades it froze (in a strange way, the mouse would show when i moved it but it would be just a blank screen) and after restarting it would show the login screen for a second, and then disappear, and then reappear to do the same thing a few moments later. Then I tried getting squeeze running from a netinstall cd, which installed but I couldn't find the xorg.conf file to modify properly! I looked in all the usual places but there didn't seem to be one.
So, long story short, has anyone gotten Squeeze running on a similar iMac?

Well I've got Sid running on an iMac G3/333. I installed stable (lenny), then updated to testing (squeeze) & sid. Once lenny was installed I had no issues upgrading, but if you have a look through How to install debian on imac-emac ppc, very verbose set-up you will find some xorg conf downloads that might be of use.

Cheers