Warning Re: MandrakePPC 9.1 (OT)

[Katsu Tanda]

Speaking of Debian and Gentoo, which did you find to
be better? I am thinking of installing one of those on
an x86 machine and possibly some older macs to
hopfully extract every last bit of performance out of
them.

Sorry to hear about your misfortune. Good to hear that
you did have backups. 


--- Harvey Ussery <huboxwood@earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> yellowdog-general mailing list
> yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus