installing linux on a G3 imac

Hi, I am some what of a computer noob, i have yellowdog on my PS3 though (that was easy). Anyway, I recently picked up a old g3 imac from my college, it doesnt boot up so i am guessing there is no OS on it. I was think linux would be a good what to go as it is free. I have no idea what linux it can run or how to go about installing it, any help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated

thanks

(P.S. I just signed up so sorry if this is the wrong place for this post)

I believe you're referring to a "Power Mac G3" as there is no such machine as an iMac G3.

In any event, I don't believe there is a version of Linux which will run on that machine as it has a Power PC 750 processor. Linux runs on i386 machines.

I'm not 100% certain of that and suggest you go to one of the many Linux forums and ask. A good one would be the very popular Ubuntu Linux Users forum. Here's the Link: Ubuntu Forums

Regards.

chscag said:

I believe you're referring to a "Power Mac G3" as there is no such machine as an iMac G3.

Click to expand...

Sure there is, I've had 2 of them, tray loading 333 mhz iMacs.
Yellow Dog will run just fine on it, if you can find an older version.
I had version 2.0 running on mine with 512 mb memory.
Check the specs on Yellow Dog to see what the newest version will run.

Hey, thanks for the info.

Mea Culpa. I did find an iMac G3 (Summer of 2001 according to Mactracker) However, I could not find a version of Yellow Dog Linux that would run on the G3:

Link

Regards.

I think the latest for PPC was Yellowdog 5, and Ubuntu definitely had a version, but the most up to date Linux for PPC is OpenSUSE 11.1 - see their download page Software.openSUSE.org

Cheers

Hugh

Thanks Hugh. Noted and bookmarked.

thanks people, would the mac boot from a disc? i dont know how to go about an install

thanks

Jakeyjake said:

thanks people, would the mac boot from a disc? i dont know how to go about an install

thanks

Click to expand...

Yup, it will boot (hold the C key down as normal).
I tried an older version of SuSE on an iBook G3 a while ago and installed it to an external disk. It installed fine but that would not boot 'cos I forgot to take into account the iBook won't boot to a USB disk. I didn't have a firewire to spare at the time so stopped experimenting.

Cheers

Hugh