[aklug] Fun with PowerPC

[Mike]

My father recently wanted to get rid of his old iMac G5 PPC.

His first concern was erasing the harddrive so that none of his data  
was on it.

After poking around some, it turns out, from what I could find, that  
there isn't really a good way to wipe a MAC OS drive without having  
some other drive to boot.

Since it was a working machine, I used the Internet to download a  
small ISO image onto a 2GB USB drive.

Three key things were:

  - ensure that the USB gets formatted with HFS (use diskutil)
  - restore the iso image onto the newly created Volume (not the usb  
drive itself)
  - after rebooting the machine, use Cmd-Option-O-F to get into openfirmware

After getting into the firmware, you just issue this command:

boot ud:,\\yaboot

If you did everything right, it should boot into a shell which will  
allow you to install a Linux OS (Ubuntu for me) or go to a command  
line and wipe the drive.

I used this command:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX


Where X is a, b or whatever letter your drive shows up as.

It was a 250GB drive and took quite a while (more than 4 hours).

I'm now installing Xubuntu on it.

I like to revive old hardware...even got a laugh about using the old  
G5 box that it came in, until they realized it really was that computer!

It makes me wonder if I'm the only one putting Linux on old G5's....

Mike B.