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MintPPC on a Sawtooth

Schmoburger

Well-known member
Well... Ive decided to make some use of the Sawtooth by having a play around with it as a nixbox.

From what I've gleaned, MintPPC would seem to be quite a nice option as far as a fast, functional and pretty looking distro to make the old bucket feel newish again, and get myself a little more familiar with the workings of modernish Linux's, so I downloaded me a bootable netinstaller ISO and was going to toss an install of MintPPC 11 onto the old graphite tart and see what it does. Realistically it's the only way any of my 32-bit PPC Macs are ever going to be useful again given that 10.4 is slow as balls and well,OS9 just seems like a waste of all that (relatively speaking) horsepower when 10.3 ran so fluidly and nicely before it became the useless unsupported waste of hard disk space it now is.

Anybody got any experience to share? Anything I should know? like I said, I'm fairly freshfaced in the world of modern Linux, and for that matter Linux of any description. :)

 

johnklos

Well-known member
GNU/Linux used to be very decent on low-memory, modest CPU systems. A Sawtooth should run decently with a gig of memory. However, browsers like Firefox completely suck, as do half the web sites out there that would love to max out every CPU with Javascript crap. Browsers like Midori should be a bit less resource hungry. You may want to try a few different ones.

 

Schmoburger

Well-known member
Cheeers fellas... Well I got it installed but had to go to work. I breifly tested it and it was a little slow but I think I am only running 128Mb in the Saw so that would explain a bit. Also it is using the bad liney garbley Rage128 PCI card which seems to slow down whatever it is installed in. It does boot however and function in some way or another :) .

A tangential question I have is this... what do I have to do to force my G3 B+W or Yikes to attempt to boot that install on that drive? I presume there may be some  driver issues but for the best part, I couldnt see a reason for it to not at least try and then panic or fail later if it cant find a driver it needs. Besides... I cant imagine too much crucial hardwre being considerably different. At this point, I have slipped the drive into both machines and it refuses to detect them as bootable... the G3 has been sitting for 20 minutes with a flashing question mark. The Yikes is temperamental at best after I shorted the internal speaker output a few years ago, but the  G3 has always been fully functional, so am I right in assuming I have to tell Open Firmware to look for a non-Mac boot kernel via an OF command or six?

 

galgot

Well-known member
Have you partitioned the drive for dual boot (MacOS - MintPPC) ? Or a complete drive for Mint ?

I you must have Yaboot (NewWorld PPC boot manager) to have a linux booting. Should be with the Mint installer.

http://ppcluddite.blogspot.fr/2012/03/installing-debian-linux-on-ppc-part-ii.html

No need to go to OpenFirmware, once Yaboot is installed, you'll have the choise at start up, ie , l for linux, or m for Mac OS9 or x for OSX, depends of what you've installed.

 
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Schmoburger

Well-known member
Nah havent got a Mac partition at all... partitioned the entire thing to use it as Mint-only, with seperate partitions for various shite as seems to be the convention that is most accepted among the seasoned enthusiasts. :)

So I dare say that  the Netinstaller boot disc i used to install it on the Saw would would need to be used to boot the machine and set up the machine to boot from the drive? I tried booting of  the CD on the Yikes however it had a spaz at me and locked up... I have a suspicion however that this may be an issue with the optical drive, as it has begun jamming shut, and it also munched an Install of Tiger last time also part way through... From memory it also panicked on ona recent Panther bootup from CD. I might see if the B+W will have more success booting from the disc.

I should also take this time to state that this message is by the way, being sent from within Iceweasel on the  Sawtooth... It's a tad pokey being that it's only a 400MHz model, and the video card is cactus, but it is still quite respectable... I never thought I would see a New World 32-bit Mac be this useful and still be fluid enough to stay usable ever again without going back to OS9 after Panther was left behind. Mint has actually a rather a pleasant UI... very windowsesque, but I am not necessarily adverse to that, and it's fairly intuitive all told. I must say I am enjoying it a lot, and very much considering putting some form of Linux on the G5 also as a dual-bootable system when I get round to putting SSD's in it. I can only imagine a 64-bit optimized variant being blisteringly quick, given that even on the 400MHz G4 it is comfortable enough. :)

 
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