Installing Ubuntu on Powerbook G4 OSX 10.4 - Help!!

Hi,

Best to start with the fact that I'm no expert so be gentle

I have a Powerbook G4 17" running Tiger 10.4.11

I downloaded the Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 32bit and burned to disk. I also copied it to USB.

After reading instructions on how to install I loaded the disk and restarted, holding down 'C' to boot the disk. Just went straight to OSX. I then tried booting to firmware and typing 'boot cd' and got error

'boot cd load-size=0 adler32=1 LOAD SIZE is too small'

I then tried booting to firmware and typed 'boot usb 0/disk@1:2, \\yaboot'

I tried this replacing 'usb 0' with 'usb 1' and 'usb 2'. I only have two ports so I guessed the one I was plugged into had to be named either 0, 1 or 2. Each time the screen flicked briefly to text appearing half way down the left side, but then flicking to a grey blank screen with a No Entry sign.

I read some information saying that a partition is required to install Ubuntu but when I tried this a message appears in disk utility saying I can't partition because the disk contains the start up volume. I don't have my original OSX boot discs so I can't partition via the install process.

Thinking about the error message booting with the disk 'LOAD-SIZE is too small' I wondered if maybe I'd burnt the wrong software. The disk space taken up for the download was under 700mb, is this right?

I looked on the Ubuntu website and discovered many different places to download from this page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads

At this point I realised that installing Ubuntu on an older Mac is by no means a simple task.

Can someone please help me out here? It seems Ubuntu is the only way I'll be able to keep this fantastic piece of kit running safely. It's been sitting gathering dust for years after my son ripped off 13 of the keys and the port for connecting my cam stopped working. I've decided to bring it back to life but it's proving tricky.

Thanks in advance

If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend that you read their PowerPC guide here. That should answer most (if not all) of your questions.

vansmith said:

If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend that you read their PowerPC guide here. That should answer most (if not all) of your questions.

Click to expand...

To be honest it's only confused me. It seems I need to be more technically knowledgeable to find this useful.

I suppose what I need is someone who's done it and can simply provide step-by-step instructions on what I need to do. These things never are that straight forward though <sighs>

Thank you though

Well, let's start nice and simple.

First, did you burn the Ubuntu image as an image file? It other words, does the disk now contain a set of folders and files or does it just have the ISO image file? If it's the latter, you'll need to reburn it as an image file. This might explain why you can't boot from it.