PPC Linux
OS X is too much of a hog to keep it running on my ‘lamp’ iMac and I figured the hardware is old enough for even PPC Linux to install painlessly. Sadly we don’t have live CDs for PPC and I haven’t been able to burn a DVD-RW that the imac would read, so I went and grabbed Gutsy. Booted right into the native res, and in less than an hour I had refreshed the life of a dying machine. I am still impressed by ubuntu installation. It’s precisely how it’s supposed to be done for a desktop machine.
Few more years and I’ll even have GL running 
December 18th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Fedora has PPC as a supported platform and provides a installable Live image for PPC architecture just FYI
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora
December 18th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I too thought my old mac should be a piece of cake but tried to get Gutsy on my first gen iMac lamp and failed miserably so I just left it with a bare bones Tiger install (it just falls below the minimum Leopard specs). Wireless and issues with sleep were just two of the horror stories I read about but just getting it to boot from a CD was a problem for me.
December 18th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
I upgraded my video in Power G5 from Nvidia to ATI – so I have at least compiz running. ATI OSS drivers are way better now. Hopefully, one day nouveau will make it too..
December 18th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I’m about to start my own PPC Linux adventure, so thanks for sharing your experience – Mine will be with an older machine though (500MHz iBook G3)…
BTW – thank you for creating Darkilouche!
December 18th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
I’ve been running Ubuntu on a G4-based Mac Mini for a while now. Overall, it’s pretty much the same as my x86 installs. If I were using it as a desktop machine (I use it more like a “TV set top box”), I’d definitely miss having a decent flash player (gnash just isn’t there yet).
December 19th, 2007 at 2:37 am
I plan to buy an old Mac just to run Linux. BTW, Old-World Macs (before G3) are rather annoying: you HAVE to keep a Mac OS install just to boot Linux!
December 19th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I installed Ubuntu gutsy on a iBook G4 recently using Gutsy ‘Alternate CD’.
The only thing that was not working out of box was sound. I had to add snd-powermac to /etc/modules.
December 20th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Rahul, sadly Fedora doesn’t provide PPC liveCDs either, so I get the same problem as with openSUSE, the drive just refuses to read the DVDRW.
December 30th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Jimmac, have you tried adjusting your burn speed when writing DVD disks? I had no problems booting openSUSE or Fedora on my G4 after slowing down the DVD burn to 4x. This document explains why that speed works best when the disk is used on different drives…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=DVD-RQandA.doc&btnG=Search
January 5th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Thanks for the tip Hawkeye, will give it a shot.
January 11th, 2008 at 2:40 am
[...] I’ve been struggling to get Linux installed on my Mac running 10.4. openSUSE installed fine, but rEFIt wouldn’t boot it from either USB or Firewire drive. So I shrunk my HFS+ partition using diskutil patched by the expired beta of Apple Bootcamp. Installed openSUSE, with the rescueCD workaround to get MBR updated and booted. Thinking I am done I ejected the DVD, but then I realized I’ll probably need something installed without grabbing it off the net, I put it back in. Well I though I have, but instead I put in the damn PPC DVDRW I failed with on the iMac. It is cursed. Like seriously cursed. [...]