Warning Re: MandrakePPC 9.1 (OT)

[Harvey Ussery]

This is by way of warning to other lost souls out there who are 
experimenting with new Linux distro's for the Mac platform. I've been 
using YDL for some time now as my stable install. Recently I decided to 
play around with some new distro's, and successfully installed both 
Debian & Gentoo PPC flavors on my iMac (though did not get X up & 
running on either). Decided to try MandrakePPC 9.1 (Bamboo), because I 
had read claims for Mandrake's extreme ease of installation.

The installer: Inexplicably skipped forward a couple of steps (mouse & 
keyboard config) when I tried to back up to a previous page -- 
completely misread my partition map -- failed to return to text console 
after an X config test, leaving me with a persistent black screen 
(despite ctrl-alt-backspace & ctrl-alt-delete) -- and, worst of all by 
far, completely trashed my partition map & changed flags and/or 
corrupted filesystems on all partitions, leaving me unable to boot 
MacOSX, YDL, Debian, Gentoo on those partitions. No OpenFirmware trick 
I've learned allowed me in anywhere; and no attempt to get in to a Linux 
install in single user mode--nothing worked. I finally had to get out 
the CD's & reinstall >everything< from scratch. (Yes, my data was backed 
up, thank you.) Two full days & I'm still not fully recovered.

I am not a neophyte when it comes to multiple-boot installs and 
difficult issues with OpenFirmware & yaboot. And probably someone's 
going to post in the next 5 minutes: "Oh, really--I installed 
MandrakePPC 9.1 on my iMac Hotshot with no problem >at all<!" But in my 
opinion, the installer in this release is a seriously broken piece of 
software. Certainly I never encountered an installer in any other distro 
that even >touched< anything on another partition. I pass this on as a 
warning to anyone else in the PPC crowd who is thinking of playing 
around with new distro's.

--Harvey