[aklug] Fun with PowerPC

[Christopher Howard]

A few months ago I put Debian Jessie PPC on a G4 laptop. It seemed to
work great, except it was a tad slow loading and using applications.
(Old, slow internal drive? Low CPU power?) I haven't used it much though
because I don't like the gigantic, awkwardly placed touchpad. (I never
really liked touch pads. The thinkpads have them but it also has a
"pointing stick" which I use instead.)

On 05/23/2017 06:53 PM, Mike wrote:
> 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.
> 
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