Comments on: Revive your old Mac G3, G4, or G5 with Linux

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:44:58 +0000

Tempted to try the PPC Linux distros but the last time I installed Linux distro was on Amiga 500+ w/68030+fpu hw. It was rough and X Windows server was a pain to get up and running.

And, given most Open Source operating systems and software I’ve downloaded, it’s not worth the headaches.

By: Brad

Brad — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:24:50 +0000

I just left the same 10.3.9 OSX on my eMAC that came with it- and it runs fine –never put anything on it newer than when I bought it. The only Linux box I have in the house is a OLPC green machine– which I’ve updated once –that works nicely too for the things it will do.

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:09:38 +0000

CRUX PPC forever…

By: Caleb

Caleb — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 02:32:03 +0000

I just did this to an old power g4 with ubuntu 10.04 ppc edition, the normal 10.10 edition wouldn’t work.
Just as a heads up, on Macs holding right click while booting opens your cd drive and holding c will run a cd.

By: jessica

jessica — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:11:33 +0000

i have a g3 and i just bought the iphoto 08 and it wont work on my mac it need to be g5 is there anyway i can still get it to work?? please???/

By: Geoff

Geoff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:30:14 +0000

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my old g4/450.

I was going to toss it, but I use it all the time now! Its quite slow launching applications, but once they’re up, everything seems to work well! I might drop in another video card (available cheap!) and some more RAM to speed performance up a bit, but It certainly feels good to get that box up and running again.

By: GoblinX Project » GoblinX Newsletter, Issue 204 (06/14/2009)

GoblinX Project » GoblinX Newsletter, Issue 204 (06/14/2009) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:22:08 +0000

[...] Revive your old Mac G3, G4, or G5 with Linux [...]

By: Revive your old Mac G3, G4, or G5 with Linux | Mash Central

Revive your old Mac G3, G4, or G5 with Linux | Mash Central — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:34:17 +0000

[...] Read the original post: Revive your old Mac G3, G4, or G5 with Linux [...]

By: defraz

defraz — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:38:31 +0000

Look also to fedora, using it on my ibook g4 and everithing is beautiful and leading edge ;))

By: Gen2ly

Gen2ly — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:57:03 +0000

Arch linux also has a PPC installer, it’s a text bases installer so you’ll need to follow the guide closely. Also too I’d recommend that Mac’s have at least 384MB of RAM, that’s what i got on my ibook and it just barely get’s by with Gnome.

http://www.archlinuxppc.org/download/
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide

By: dragonbite

dragonbite — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:33:01 +0000

If you need to install via DVD and the machine doesn’t have one you may want to look into UNetbootin if the machine can boot from a usb stick. The advantage is if the USB stick is big enough you can place an entire DVD on it.

Otherwise, look at a CD of a NetInstaller. They are ~100 MB installer that gets all of its packages during the actual installation over the internet.

By: NightFlyer

NightFlyer — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:47:43 +0000

“Yellow God Linux is a Linux distribution that is only created for PPC architecture.”

I think that’s meant to be Yellow Dog

By: Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:38:35 +0000

Ubuntu Jaunty is also available for PowerPC, WITH a graphical installer:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/jaunty/release/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-powerpc.iso
or the alternate CD:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/jaunty/release/ubuntu-9.04-alternate-powerpc.iso

By: Karl

Karl — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:06:51 +0000

One of the problems with these distributions is that they require DVD players, which many of the old Macs do not have. I wound up installing Debian without the gui – http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/ – on my G4.