That’s also the latest version available for PowerPC at present. Version 14.04 was released in the 4th month of 2014, and 16.04 in the 4th month of 2016. Ubuntu Linux has a simple numbering scheme for its versions. Lubuntu is known for having a lighter-weight user interface, LXDE – similar to what Simon Royal used when he put LXLE on an old PC. After talking with others in our small-but-growing Linux PPC Facebook group, I settled on Lubuntu as a good starting point. It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin. My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard. If only I’d had a blank CD-R or DVD-R, it would have been a lot easier! This time around I wanted to create a “live” flash drive so I could make sure it actually worked before committing to installing Linux on a hard drive. Everything was handled through the command line in the late 1990s.
Back in the olden days, Linux was a text-based operating system similar to MS-DOS. I’ve experimented with Linux and BSD Macs going back to the Mac IIci era, and I’ve never had much luck. I’m going to make it a lot easier for you to install Linux on your old PPC Macs. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. Next post I'll describe kernel config and driver issues, and give a copy of my kernel config for anyone who tries this.It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac. So, moral of the story, use GRUB, and the wiki should probably be changed, or at least edited. It works very well, and is also what I'm used to. Thankfully, someone on a forum about this bug suggested using GRUB, and I'm glad they did. This error will probably not be fixed, as yaboot is no longer maintained. If I stayed with yaboot, I would have had to re-format my disk as something other than ext4 and start over. I was very worried that I would have to start all the way over (I had spent a few hours at this point), because I did not have a separate /boot partition.
Of course, I did not know this while installing, and fell right into this trap. Instead, it gives a cryptic error and exits. The (main) problem with yaboot is that it simply does not vibe with ext4. This is strange because the livecd image they provide uses GRUB. It tells you to use yaboot as your bootloader, instead of GRUB. I started by following the PowerPC Handbook on Gentoo's wiki, which is pretty good. This is the second post in my series about installing Gentoo Linux on a Mac Mini G4.
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