SHAOS » macos https://shaos.net/blog { Personal Blog of Shaos } Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:15:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1 Debian on my Beige G3 https://shaos.net/blog/2009/02/debian-on-my-beige-g3.html https://shaos.net/blog/2009/02/debian-on-my-beige-g3.html#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:55:00 +0000 http://shaos.net/blog4/?p=30 OK, I got Debian GNU/Linux on my desktop Power Macintosh G3 “Beige” BUT, to do this I bought MacOS 9 CD for 20 dollars on ebay:

Because I broke pre-installed MacOS by trying to install Debian on this “OldWorld” mac (see here). So, after installing MacOS 9 back I again tried to install Debian (using BootX 1.2.2 from MacOS). After a number of tries of reinstallation of both I realized that MacOS 9 and Debian CAN’T live on the same hard-drive, because they are breaking partition table for each other…

So I’d decided to go to ebay again – now for SCSI drive. 18 GB IBM SCSI drive (1997) with 50-pin adapter was just 30 dollars plus 4 for cable and 11 for shipping.

Important things about installation on Beige G3:

  • it will fail to detect printer, simply go back to menu and choose installation again;
  • bootloader quik requires ext2 partition for /boot (even if it’s not needed – I pressed NO later to disable bootloader installation);
  • it is important to save vmlinux and initrd.img on ZIP-drive before reboot – we will need it in MacOS for BootX loader – so go to shell and do chroot /target then mount /dev/hdd4 /mnt then cd /boot then cp vmlinux /mnt and cp initrd.img /mnt then umount /mnt then exit and exit to go to menu back;
  • then just finish installation process.

So now I have MacOS 9.2.2 on EIDE hard-drive and GNU/Linux on SCSI hard-drive – separately they work fine. After boot computer goes to MacOS first and then using BootX loader I can choose to go to Linux (copy vmlinux and initrd.img to Linux Kernels first).

Inside Linux I traditionally have Russian user interface:

P.S. After installation of Debian 4.0r7 from NetInst CD I found that during installation it’s magically transformed to Debian 5.0 “Lenny” that was released just now ;)

P.P.S. So if you need cheap PowerPC machine for Linux, DON’T buy Beige G3! Better choice is Blue&White PowerMac G3 that can be bought just for $9.99 (plus $32.50 for shipping) in some places (300 MHz, 64 MB RAM, no HDD) – see here story how I got it

]]> https://shaos.net/blog/2009/02/debian-on-my-beige-g3.html/feed 0 Desktop Power Macintosh G3 "Beige" https://shaos.net/blog/2009/02/desktop-power-macintosh-g3-beige.html https://shaos.net/blog/2009/02/desktop-power-macintosh-g3-beige.html#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:57:00 +0000 http://shaos.net/blog4/?p=28 A few days ago I bought Power Macintosh G3 with PowerPC G3 processor (300MHz) for 25 dollars (and 45 shipping):

It has old Apple monitor connector and because of that I needed VGA-adapter (5 dollars on ebay) to connect my Samsung 19″ monitor to this machine:

It was shipped with MacOS 9 onboard that can handle screen dimension up to 1280×1024 (with 256 colors):

After setup Internet connection through Ethernet, I immediately tried to install Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 on it, BUT it is last “OldWorld” macintosh with buggy Open Firmware v2.4 that can boot only from MacOS (trick with patch from “SystemDisk 2.3.1″ didn’t help). I used BootX 1.2.2 to boot Debian installer directly from MacOS and removed MacOS to install Debian (it was my mistake) and after that this machine refused to boot. So now I’m waiting for MacOS 9.2.2 disk (another 20 dollars) to install it again and then I will use Debian through BootX only…

Updated: Success story of Debian installation is here

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