Is their a 'Live CD' for a G3 I-Mac (not a Power PC?

[ronnie__g]

For the past few days I have been trying to find a Live CD for a G3 I-Mac
(this is a desktop, not a Power PC)
I started off trying Knoppix, then Gentoo....

Kind of think I am doing something wrong, or the G3 isn't supported?
Mac site ID's the machine as a iMac/iMac DV (slot loading)

I down load the iso, burn the CD and it looks OK in Windows 2000
Stick the CD into the iMac, power on with the 'c' key held down.
The iMac will stay with a blank screen as long as I hold the 'c' key.
As soon as I release the 'c' key the iMac boots on the Mac OS.

I am ok on i386 units, but this is my first try at a Mac.
Am trying to help a friend, so far only spinning my wheels?

Any suggestions / instructins / links would be a help...
I 'do not' want to install Linux / Knoppix, I want to run it from a Live CD
and still have access to the Mac HD.

Thanks for any tips.

[softwaretester]

I think that people who are familiar with Yellow Dog Linux may have tried something like this.
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

You might be able to create your own live cd by getting a 4 gig hard drive, putting it into your G box, installing Yellow Dog on it, and then going through the steps to manually cook your own Live CD (based on Remastering Notes)

I haven't cooked my own Live CD yet for Intel. I got as far as extracting everything to a folder, and having difficulties with mounting chmodding, creating links.. somewhere in there.

The people who made slax have made a script which can create a live CD, so it's worth looking at.

[softwaretester]

For best results, aim your search engine for
ppc64 livecd

ftp://ftp.crihan.fr/mirrors/knoppix-mib.org/

Found it with a search..
http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2004/03/msg00263.html

Since it's alpha software, it likely isn't a full featured knoppix, nor is it likely to be stable.

[ronnie__g]

I am looking / posting at Yellowdog....

My desktop is not a 64bit, is not a powerPC
(I have tried 3 Power PC iso's, none will boot)

The iMac I have is a G3 iMac DV (350 MHZ G3 cpu, 32 bit software)
One cd iso was suppose to support the iMac G3, but won't boot.

(yes the md5sum was correct on the iso, and no errors reported on the burn under win2000)

Thanks for the input

[webvandals]

Maybe I can help a little. First of all: Your iMac most certainly is a PowerPC. You're correct that it's not 64bit though (ya need a G5 for that).

Your options (that I know of) are:
Yellow Dog
Mandrake 9.1 PPC
Debian PPC
Gentoo PPC

Yellow Dog is essentially a PPC-only version of Red Hat 9. If you use one of the others, you'll need to make sure you download and burn the PPC iso's. Make sure you've got a PPC version, then make sure you burn the iso's correctly (it's different for iso's ya know), and you should be good to go.

Good luck!

[ronnie__g]

:oops:
After I wrote that it was't a Power PC, I wondered?
I know 'zip' about Mac's, have been trying to find a Live CD
(on and off) for about 2 months, well not really TRYING...

Thanks AGAIN for the help / education / kindness....
I'll look at those home pages....

COULD I be doing something else wrong, or do I need to
do something more than hold down the 'c' key at power on.
Or maybe my CD drive is just dead?...... (something I never thought of)
(I have burnt a few hunderd CD's, and am ok with a iso)
After the power up, it says the CD is not readable, reads ok on Win2000
Course won't boot a i386, but can read the file system ok..
I'll have to verify the CD can read when it boots a clean boot.

THANKS agian for the info

[rom]

Hey! I've the same problem, and I've tried with MiB liveCD and knoppix dists on my new iBook (bought on March). The isos are correct, I burn them on Toast and/or Nero, and the results are all the same: THEY DON'T BOOT ANYWAY!!

Recently I discovered that there's a program called Disk Utility under Applications/Utilities on MacOSX that gives information about isos/partitions/cds. I explored the iso images downloaded and all of them had the "bootable" flag to "no". I tried with an old bootable cd containing Mac OS 9 (at least it's bootable on my old PowerPC) and the result was the same! (bootable=no). Then I tried with the Hardware Test CD that comes with my iBook (wich is bootable) and the flag on the DiskUtility said "bootable: yes"...

The only difference between this CD and the others is that the last one has a "Mac Extended" property, where the other have "Mac Standard"...

Those who can boot knoppix-ppc cds...how do you burn them? is there any trick?? What information give you the disk utility util with the knoppix bootable cd???

Thanks!!!