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On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:16:16 +0100 Richard Brown <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Guys
I have a G3 iMac - the purple sort although I think Apple called it some other colour. I am about to stick it up on ebay. I reckon I might get £100! But before I do I wonder whether I can install Debian on it.
The specs are PowerPC G3 333MHz with 160mb Ram and a 6gig H/D. It has a
CD Rom but no floppy drive.
I currently own a G4 Powerbook and hope shortly to invest in a new G5
iMac. I would like a Linux machine to act as a back-up for both laptop
and desktop. It would also run all the php/mysql files that I currently
run.
Would it be possible to install a larger hard drive (160gig) and run Debian on this G3 to act as a backup machine or would I be better off flogging the machine for as much as I can get and buying a beige box and installing Linux on that!
Rich www.littlebigfoot.org.uk "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the messenger bringing good news." Isaiah 52 v 7 (The Message)
It shouldn't be a problem installing Debian. From what I can see the G3s and above are very well supported. If you intend to do a 'net install, then just download a mini-CD image from here (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/). As far as I can tell, the differences are:
+ netinst CD image, with Debian base
This will be the quickest to get up and running since it doesn't have to download the 'Debian base'.
Boots from CD, installs base from CD, reboot from harddrive and then complete installation.
+ businesscard CD image
This will need to download the 'Debian base' before you can get anything done.
Boots from CD, installs base from 'net, reboot from harddrive and then complete installation.
+ other boot images (netboot, usb stick, floppy)
Just in case!
If you've got a PXE-compliant NIC, and a FTP/TFTP boot-server, then go for netboot.
If you can boot from USB, go for usbstick.
If you can't boot from CD, go for floppy.
I would say that it's swings and roundabouts as for which one to use.
As for installing a 160Gb harddrive... I would have thought it'd be alright. I know that in x86 Linux it usually ignores the sizes reported by the BIOS, but I don't know whether PPC Linux ignores the size reported by OpenFirmware (or even if OpenFirmware reports a disk size!). Certainly I installed a 6Gb disk into an oldworld (pre G3) PowerMac and it worked fine.
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