<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Jim Kronebusch wrote: <blockquote cite="mid20070321141224.M68831@winonacotter.org" type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">I'm a complete mac noob. From what I've gleaned from the net the particular box I have switches to serial port mode when doing that. Not one of apples brighter ideas. I have an old wyse terminal I can plug into the computer but have to track down a cable first. I was just hoping a simple boot floppy would do the trick. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> I don't think you'll have much luck with booting one of the old clones. I don't think those old power computing machines had an openfirmware that worked the same as the iMacs. I tried booting the old apple G3 all-in-one machines before as well with no luck. I think you need an iMac Bondi G3 or newer. I know Chuck Liebow has booted the real old 52XX series (nubus macs) but that takes a ton of manual tweaks to accomplish. </pre> </blockquote> That's because the really old Macs didn't have OpenFirmware at all. Those are "OldWorld" machines that need something like BootX to boot Linux (yaboot won't work). Yellow Dog Linux used to have BootX up to at least the v3.0 series. Your clone likely is an OldWorld machine. My suggestion would be to grab an older version of Yellow Dog Linux, do a minimal installation of it on this clone box (the bare basics + X11 is all you need--i. e. no GNOME, no KDE, none of that stuff). Then tell X11 to do a XDMCP query at boot time (you can do that in /etc/rc.d/rc.local). This is how I did it on a Sun Ultra 5 box with Red Hat Linux 6.2, as well as with a Power Mac 5500 with YDL 2.3. Note that you probably will need at least 32MB DRAM for this to work at all. YDL on the Power Mac 5500 didn't like it too well when I had less than 32MB DRAM in there, swap partition or no. If it's a NuBus device, then you're in for some real work. Like Chuck, I too have done it with NuBus 5200's. Once you figure out how to do it, it's not that hard. But that first time figuring out the details to make it actually work is a pain. --TP </body> </html>