[CS-FSLUG] openSUSE on eMac

[Ed Hurst]

After trying for several months, I simply could not adjust myself to the
Leopard interface and the Tao of Mac. I went in search of a Linux distro
which would offer some hope of running on my aging eMac.

Great adventure. Much suffering and anguish. Finally, apparent victory.

The biggest headache was the partitioning gotchas. PPC machines from Mac
require a small Apple-HFS partition for the boot loader, since there is
no BIOS configuration, per se. Then it was a matter of having to do it
with a proper commandline version of fdisk (pdisk) and manually making
the changes.

Eventually, I found more useful help for SUSE 11.0, and eventually got
it to install and boot. It operates a good bit faster than Leopard and,
of course, offers the support for all my Linux habits, which support was
largely absent from OS X.

I also tested Ubuntu 8.04.1 for PPC, but it wouldn't get past the
loading phase. The screen went blank and nothing happened. It turns out
there is a workaround, but I didn't find that out until much later. It
seemed far more painful than the SUSE gotchas anyway. I note YDL no
longer supports the eMac, and I'm not really fond of Fedora or Mandrake.
I might have considered vanilla Debian, but I prefer something which
tends to offer more automated configuration.


-- 
Ed Hurst
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