It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin.
My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard. If only I’d had a blank CD-R or DVD-R, it would have been a lot easier! This time around I wanted to create a “live” flash drive so I could make sure it actually worked before committing to installing Linux on a hard drive. Everything was handled through the command line in the late 1990s. Back in the olden days, Linux was a text-based operating system similar to MS-DOS. I’ve experimented with Linux and BSD Macs going back to the Mac IIci era, and I’ve never had much luck.
I’m going to make it a lot easier for you to install Linux on your old PPC Macs. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac.
