Best distro for a PM 5500?

[danielnez1]

Hello,

I've got a Power Mac 5500/225, 128 MB RAM (with a 400 MHz Sonnet
Crescendo G3 overclocked to 500 MHz) and have tried to install both
Yellowdog 4.1 and Debian 5 with BootX without success. Yellowdog will
simply have a kernel panic during bootup and Debian will hang during
the installation phase.

Is any reasonably modern distribution that will work with my Mac.

Another issue is that BootX does not seem to work with the G3 upgrade,
is there any way to overcome this or will I just have to use the base
603e?

Cheers,

Dan

[Stephen Harker]

Post by danielnez1
I've got a Power Mac 5500/225, 128 MB RAM (with a 400 MHz Sonnet
Crescendo G3 overclocked to 500 MHz) and have tried to install both
Yellowdog 4.1 and Debian 5 with BootX without success. Yellowdog will
simply have a kernel panic during bootup and Debian will hang during
the installation phase.

The yellowdog releases post YDL3 did not come with all the drivers
needed for oldworld machines in the supplied kernel. There are two
ways around this: (i) is to create your own kernel and disk image to do
the install of a later version, I have not tried this only seen
references, or (ii) create your own kernel and use 'yum' to upgrade
the packages to a later version. I have used the latter method to
upgrade my 7600/200 from ydl3 successively to ydl4, ydl5, ydl6 and now
ydl6.1. This method does have its own problems, but certainly has
worked for me.

For the first method, look at the discussion thread:

http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=339

I can't answer on the Debian problems, nevery having used it.
However, I had always understood Debian to have better support for
OldWorld machines. I did a quick google search and the following
appears to have some possibly useful links:

http://gonz.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/installing-ubuntu-510-breezy-badger-on-an-old-world-powerbook-g3-wallstreet/

or for ubuntu:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Installation/OldWorldMacs

Post by danielnez1
Another issue is that BootX does not seem to work with the G3 upgrade,
is there any way to overcome this or will I just have to use the base
603e?

For upgrade cards you normally need to set various parameters. The
normal one is the G3 cache, discussed in the readme file according to:

http://penguinppc.org/bootloaders/bootx/

On the specific machine and a G3 upgrade I don't know the situation.
Sometimes there can be problems. There is some discussion on:

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ppc/2006-07/msg00022.html

[danielnez1]

Thank you for your reply.

I've managed to install Xubuntu onto the system. As you can expect its
not particularly fast when using Xfce. Its still crashing with the
Crescendo G3 upgrade. I should point out that on the Powermac 5500,
its CPU is soldered onto the motherboard, so the upgrade goes into the
L2 cache slot. Other people have reported various problems with using
the upgrade card, but it will work in some cases.

Another problem I've discovered is that during the install phase, it
had no trouble connecting to the internet with my comm Ethernet and
wireless bridge, however once its installed the wireless bridge will
display the LAN light but won't connect to the wireless network, and
the system can't find the network connection!

I'll have to do more investigating!

Cheers,

Dan