Real Newbie

[Clinton MacDonald]

Mr. Katele:

George Katele <gkatele AT interaccess DOT com> wrote:
> Obviously, I'm a Linux newbie since I've subscribed
> to this list.

Welcome aboard! Sadly, there is a problem with the
Yellow Dog Newbies list, in that the list postings are
no longer being archived (since November 2003 -- and
no one seems to know why). Therefore, I am
crossposting this answer to the Yellow Dog General
list. Do yourself a favor and sign up for that list,
too:

<http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general>

> I have several Macs in the house, some of which are
> just collecting dust, and I thought I'd give Yellow
> Dog a try.

An excellent decision! If you are willing to be
patient, this can be a rewarding exercise.

> The first Mac that I'd like to install Yellowdog on
> is an old Powermac 8500. It's been upgraded with a
> pair of 4 gig (!) SCSI hard drives, and it now has
> about 368 megs of RAM.

A PowerMac 8500 should be a fine machine to run Yellow
Dog Linux. The 4 GB hard drives will be good, and the
368 MB of RAM will be great. Go to the following Web
page and read what it says about the 8500 in the
support matrix:

<http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/breakdown/index.php?hw_cat_id=8>

> It also has a Sonnet crescendo G3 upgrade card in
it.
> The G3 replaced the legacy 604E, and is installed in
> the daughtercard slot. I've been successful running
> OS X (10.2.8) on it using some hacks.

That page states that if your upgrade is on a daughter
card (rather than, I suppose, a straight CPU
replacement), you will not be able to run YDL.
However, do not despair! You might try installing YDL
on the 8500 with the original CPU in place, then see
what happens if you upgrade the CPU afterwards.

> What kind of hassles can I expect with the
> installation, and what can I expect in terms of
> performance?

Go to the following page, download the installation
PDF, and follow it exactly:

<http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/installation/>
<http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/installation/ydl3.0_guide-single.pdf>

The 8500 is an "Old World" Mac, and you must have at
least a small (say, 250 MB) Mac OS partition installed
to boot into Yellow Dog Linux. You could also leave
one of the 4 GB disks as Mac OS and devote the second
disk to Yellow Dog Linux. The partitioning directions,
though explicit, are easy to mess up, so be sure to
read the PDF before diving in.

As for performance? That depends on what you want to
do with your computer. :-) We expect a full report
when you are done!

> The other Mac is a 17" flatscreen iMac G4 800. It's
> got 768 megs of RAM, and a bunch of external
firewire
> drives. I thought that I'd install Linux on one of
the
> external drives and have the option to boot either
the
> internal Mac drive (for OS X 10.3) or an external
> (for Yellowdog 3.0.1).

I have no experience with this setup, but it sounds
perfectly reasonable.

(On the other hand, the 800 MHz iMac is such a great
computer for Mac OS X, I would see no reason to want
to run Linux on it. Mac OS X on the iMac would be
great as a file, print, and Internet server, and
everything will work without effort. If all you want
is to learn Linux, then a cheap used Intel-based PC
would be a *much* better learning platform.)

Good luck!

Best wishes,
Clint

=====
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>