Fedora Core 2 on an OldWorld Mac

[yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

DISCLAIMER: This is a dirty, ugly, hackish a way to get
your BootX'ing OldWorld Mac running Fedora Core 2 /
Rawhide (development).  Be patient and possibly
prepared to blow up and rebuild a system a couple of
times before you get everything Just Right(tm).  That
said, my experience with Fedora Core 2 so far has been
extremely positive.

A couple of weeks ago I managed to stuff a
"stable/unofficial" snapshot of Fedora Core 2 and all
its Gnome 2.6 goodness onto a bone-stock PowerMac 8600.
 The official kernel RPM wouldn=92t boot my system (no
surprise there), so I boot with a self-compiled 2.6
from kernel.org.  Alternatively, the 2.4.22 YDL3 kernel
seemed to work find but I didn=92t spend a lot of time in
it.

I did a "minimal" install of YDL3, where only the 1st
ISO is needed.  Ok it's a bit of a fat bootstrap but
anyway, edit yum.conf to point at
fedora.linux.duke.edu/fedorappc and wget the glibc and
glibc-common RPMs. Remove hfsutils and a couple of YDL
specific-packages (with --nodeps if necessary) and rpm
upgrade glibc and glibc-common.  You=92ll then need to do
a yum update on rpm, yum, python, etc=85 basically the
package management core programs.  A final =91yum update=92
handles the rest of the system.  Be prepared to
manually mess with transitioning xfree->xorg too.=20
Actually, it would have been wiser to mirror the whole
fedorappc snapshot and point yum at the local disc, but
I did this over a 1X cellfone so allowances had to be
made ;)=20=20

For laughs, and to confuse onlookers, I installed rhgb
for a nice Fedora Core graphical boot sequence, passing
'rhgb' in the BootX args.  Panther runs fine on a 604e
under MOL (oh the irony) and FC2 recognizes the
Voodoo3, Promise IDE and USB cards, all yanked from a
PC.  I added the stuff in after to see how hard I could
push this old machine before it started spewing flames,
but so far I=92ve been able to get *everything* to stick.
 I cut yum over to a live rawhide mirror for new stuff
like Mozilla 1.7 and xfce 4.0.6.  Everything just
rocks.  Remember, rawhide is sort of like
Debian/unstable, so /expect/ stuff to break from time
to time, and don't do a "yum update" in rawhide or your
Mac will kill your dog and burn your house down.

So... if you=92re feeling adventurous and you *really*
want bleeding-edge distros on OldWorld, roll a
BootX-able VMLINUZ-FC2-2.7.7 kernel for the FC2
Installer ISO.  It might be worth asking on the
fedora-ppc mailing list if this would be welcome for
inclusion upstream.  Fedora-legacy/ppc maybe?

Lots of FC2/ppc info on google... but start with:

http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fedorappc.html
Fedora Core on your iBook (or Mac)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3D121179
Tracking bug for Fedora Core Mac (PPC) support.

Have Fun!
D.