Because I wanted to see if I could. That's why.
This weekend I spent far too many hours doing what most people would find insane. Removing the wildly popular, insanely beautiful, amazingly easy-to-use OS X from my Quicksilver 2001 PowerMac G4. In its place, I installed version 3.0.1 of Yellow Dog Linux, one of the few PPC based Linux distributions still available (Mandrake also has a PPC version of their distro - and others like SuSe still play on the PPC platform I believe.) in the attempt to...well, I don't know that there was really a practical reason why. Let's just say I was bored and leave it at that.
The thought was - “I'll install YDL then MacOnLinux so that I can still run OSX and OS9 if I want to. That'll give me the best of both worlds.“ Plus, the thought of being able to run Apple's OS natively on top of a Linux distribution just seemed to cool to pass up. First off, let me say that YDL (I've read the newsgroups, I know I'm in the minority here) is hands-down the best linux distro for PPC. That isn't saying much, though - there's a only a few. I might even venture to say that it is as good as - if not better - than it's cousin, Redhat. The install was flawless (well, not really flawless - see below) and the X Windows setup was probably the easiest I've ever done of any Linux distribution. This was probably because I was using a PowerMac G4 which has a relatively dated video card. Most of my other linux installs have been on the Intel platform with more “bleeding edge“ video cards that I install for gaming.
So, first off - for any of you trying this:
- If you have a Sonnet PCI ATA/133 card for larger drive support and the faster ATA bus, don't bother. Both Mandrake and YDL couldn't find the drive - and I tried in vain to find a linux driver for Sonnet's card. No dice. I pulled the card out and plugged my drive into the on board IDE controller.
- Mandrake couldn't detect my video card for the graphical installer. I tried to complete the setup with the text-based instaler but it crapped out at the end. I reached the conclusion that the Mandrake PPC distro blows and cut my losses.
- YDL install went wonderfully - graphical installer performed well and I was in and out in 30min.
Once I had YDL installed and booting, everything worked great - I tweaked some of the video settings for X Windows and was on my want to installing Mac-On-Linux (MOL). Downloaded the RPM and found out - guess what - YDL includes MOL out-of-the box (or off-the-CD in this case) - cool!
I got my firewire drive working (after some major hassles) - with the help of some of the scripts and info at http://www.linux1394.org. Once that was done, I partitioned my drive into 3 20gig partitions for installs of OS 9, OS X and whatever else I decided to mess with down the road. Let me say this - the MOL software is a great idea and technically wonderfully executed. The documentation sucks, though - the only answers I found where by trial and error and crawling what seemed to be endless archives of mailing list posts.
The trickiest part was getting MOL to work with the partitions correctly. You see, MOL likes to use the whole disk apparently. If you are trying to partition to create different OS installs, you need to understand how to use the linux partitioning tools in your linux distro. Understand them well, my friends. You'll be so sick of typing ./fdisk, ./pdisk, and ./parted that you'll want to puke by the time you get everything working. Once I created the partitions, I was able to boot a MOL session with the OS 9 install CD and initialize the partitions (or “drives“ within the session). I then was able to install OS 9 and OS 10.2 “Jaguar“ with no real problems. The speed is quite tolerable - dare I say enjoyable - and the MOL add-on drivers give you full networking and sound support. ROCK ON!
OS 10.3 “Panther“ was a different story. Regardless of how I configured the partitions, Panther would see the drive in the install routine, but refused to install the operating system on it for various reasons. The mailing lists seem to suggest that some have gotten this to work - I gave up and called it quits. Being able to run OS 9 and OS 10.2 on top of a Linux distro running on my G4 seemed to be more than I thought I would accomplish at the beginning. Perhaps I'll dig back into it down the road.