Fedora PPC for oldworld Mac?

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 12:18 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 22:25 -0400, Tony Nelson wrote:
> > On 09-10-28 18:24:49, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 06:17:31PM -0400, Tony Nelson wrote:
> > > >Sorry to bug developers, but I didn't get any bites from PPC
> > > >users on fedora-list.
> > > >
> > > >Does Fedora PPC work or install on oldworld PCI Macs, such as
> > > >a beige G3 desktop?  My impression is that no one has tried it
> > > >on an oldworld
> > > 
> > > 
> > > No, it doesn't.  The ppc specific release notes cover that here:
> > > 
> > > http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/en-US/
> > > index.html#sect-Release_Notes-Hardware_Requirements
> > 
> > I'd looked at the release notes.  They says "Minimum CPU: PowerPC 
> > G3..." and "Although Old World machines should work, they require a 
> > special bootloader which is not included in the Fedora distribution."  
> > My question is whether anyone has tried it in any recent Fedora
> > release and knows whether "should" means "do" or "don't".
> > 
> > (FWIW, the special bootloader is BootX, and Debian Lenny is installing 
> > now, so /some/ form of Linux works.  I just don't know anything but 
> > hearsay about Debian.  I see it uses "apt".)
> 
> I don't know of anyone who's tried it recently, but in the past we've
> fixed things in the kernel to make it work properly on OldWorld Macs and
> it _has_ been known to work fine.
> 
> It _ought_ to work if you sort out the bootloader.

oldworld topped out at 366MHz anyway right?  (the 333 and 366 Beige G3
were only sold from 1998-08-12 -> 1999-01-01 too)  That's pretty much
the minimum you'd need to run Fedora anyway these days...  Not sure it's
really worth it, you'll need at least 256MB of RAM anyway, and those
things used 168-pin 3.3V DIMMs which are pretty hard to find these days.

The Blue & White G3 was the first New World machine I think.

Remember too that you'll need your boot partition within the first 8GB
of the drive as the firmware can't handle booting from a partition which
ends anywhere past that.

Dan