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oysterman
n00b
Joined: 20 Aug 2006
Posts: 2
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 Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 9:47 pm Post subject: IMAC 350MHZ installation (solved) |
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Have an imac with a 350MHZ processor that I want to upgrade to gentoo. Downloaded gentoo and copied iso to cd. Tried to boot from cd but I got the dreaded flashing question mark. Help. Don't want to do anything fancy just yet. Only exploring linux and wanted to get started on an old box that I was not using. The goal is to show my class how linux works. Any help is appreciated. Thanx.
Last edited by oysterman on Thu Aug 24, 2006 1:08 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Jaglover
Watchman
Joined: 29 May 2005
Posts: 8291
Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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| Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 10:43 pm Post subject: |
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Welcome to Gentoo!
| Quote: | | Downloaded gentoo and copied iso to cd. |
Literally? You need to burn it as image. |
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Nick C
Guru
Joined: 18 Mar 2005
Posts: 526
Location: Portsmouth, England
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 12:02 am Post subject: |
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with only a 350mhz cpu you could find yourself waiting a while for the system to build, on my AMD64 3.5GHz an install can take 12+ hours, i dread to thing how long it takes on a 350MHz cpu, potentially days, maybe a week, and thats assuming you dont have any problems.
If your just out to explore linux might i suggest a distro like knoppix that can run from a livecd, needs no installation so can run on pretty much any pc, or if your after an easy to use, installed to disk distro then ubuntu is a great bet.
When it works, Gentoo rocks, but if you run into problems its going to be a pain having to wait hours/days while something recompiles from scratch, Ubuntu or pure Debian, or SuSe, or one of many others all offer linux, but from a pre-compiled binary install where your only limited by your max download speed  |
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cyrillic
Watchman
Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 7313
Location: Groton, Massachusetts USA
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 12:12 am Post subject: |
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Did you download the Gentoo CD for the correct architecture (ppc in your case, not x86) ?
You may also want to try a different distro, like Nick C suggested. Knoppix won't work because it is for x86, but Ubuntu would be a good bet. |
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thorpe
l33t
Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 618
Location: Sydney, Australia.
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 6:14 am Post subject: |
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Ive installed Gentoo on a 350Mhz iMac no problems. Yes, it took about 3 days though. Are you following the ppc handbook? If I remember correctly I had a few dramas getting the disk to boot. Pretty sure I had to wipe all of the Mac partition tables using dd.
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Research before taking any advice from me. I'm still coming to grips with this myself. |
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oysterman
n00b
Joined: 20 Aug 2006
Posts: 2
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| Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2006 1:49 am Post subject: Thanx for the help! |
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Thanx for all the help and suggestions. I think I'll ditch the PPC, reload OS9 and find an old PC to use.  |
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nixnut
Bodhisattva
Joined: 09 Apr 2004
Posts: 10974
Location: the dutch mountains
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| Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2006 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on PPC.
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JoseJX
Retired Dev
Joined: 28 Apr 2002
Posts: 2774
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| Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 4:47 am Post subject: |
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An iMac is a great machine for playing with Gentoo. :p If you're just playing with it, who cares how fast it is? The initial install is pretty quick (stage 3), and sure, compiling all of KDE will take a while, but X and fluxbox can be installed pretty quickly. Don't give up so easily. :)
If you got the flashing question mark, that means that you burnt the ISO wrong. Make sure that you got the PPC ISO (and not an x86 ISO) and that you've burnt it as an image (not just copying it to the disk). Hold down c on boot as the handbook suggests and you should be on your way. If you've upgraded the hard disk, be aware that the early iMacs can't boot from a >8GB root partition. (As it says in the PPC FAQ).
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Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml |
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e-ipi
Apprentice
Joined: 23 Aug 2005
Posts: 192
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| Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 2:18 am Post subject: Re: Thanx for the help! |
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| oysterman wrote: | | Thanx for all the help and suggestions. I think I'll ditch the PPC, reload OS9 and find an old PC to use. |
I recently installed gentoo on a dual 300 machine. To be sure, dual R12000 300MHz beats single 350 MHz G3 especially with fast scsi disks and a good memory architecture vs. not-so-fast IDE disks and a pokey system bus, but the machines are from generally the same era. You just have to be realistic and/or patient with what you do. Perhaps more relevant to your project, I needed to upgrade my father's revision D imac to something that will do more of what he wants to do. I tried out Ubuntu 6.0.6 and it ran pretty well on that machine (256 Mb RAM, 350MHz G3). It's as easy as download --> burn --> reboot (holding down the 'c' key, of course. I also run Slackintosh 10.2 on an old iBook. If you don't want the handholding or the compiling, perhaps that is the distro for you. |
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Gentoo on PPC
