[aklug] Fun with PowerPC

[Royce Williams]

Mike -

Thanks for the writeup - fun! I get a kick out of new OSes on old hardware.

Send a photo of it running Xubuntu (or maybe Lubuntu, for the smaller
footprint?)

And let us know about how it performs!

Royce

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 6:53 PM, Mike <alaskabarsalou at gmail.com> 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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