How TO: make Ubuntu 10.04 Bootable for PPC Mac

**Trooper1420** · June 3rd, 2010

Partitioning inherently wipes out the drive, in my experience. I don't believe you can repartition a drive and retain the contents of any existing partitions. Certainly not with any basic tools... Super Duper or some other utility might be able to do that, though I'm not sure.

The other issue is whether a Mac-formatted drive will let you install anything other than a Mac OS on it.

For me, I have a bunch of extra drives sitting about and the G4 Mirror Door has four drive bays, so I built the Ubuntu on one of the spare drives that had been written to zeros. This way, I don't have to touch my Mac drive or repartition anything to check out Ubuntu.

**828688 Ben** · June 3rd, 2010

Unfortunately, at the moment, using another hard drive is not an option for me.

**828688 Ben** · June 4th, 2010

Okay, Can someone help me setup a program called "Mac-On-Mac"?

Link to Wikipedia page about "Mac-On-Mac": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Mac

P.S. you can run linux on Mac-On-Mac

Thanks,
Ben

**sha.goyjo** · June 4th, 2010

Originally Posted by Trooper1420

Partitioning inherently wipes out the drive, in my experience. I don't believe you can repartition a drive and retain the contents of any existing partitions. Certainly not with any basic tools... Super Duper or some other utility might be able to do that, though I'm not sure.

The other issue is whether a Mac-formatted drive will let you install anything other than a Mac OS on it.

For me, I have a bunch of extra drives sitting about and the G4 Mirror Door has four drive bays, so I built the Ubuntu on one of the spare drives that had been written to zeros. This way, I don't have to touch my Mac drive or repartition anything to check out Ubuntu.

Erm, the standard tools that many people use to dual boot (refit and boot camp) both allow you to resize existing partitions without deleting them. Granted, there is always a list of extreme data loss, but I've never had it happen.

Just saying, changing partirons without data loss is not impossible. It just takes a lot of time, and it's a little risky. If you had to delete everything, nobody would ever do it.

**linuxopjemac** · June 4th, 2010

As far as I know, you can shrink OSX partitions with Disk Utility in newer versions of OSX on Intel Macs, say Leopard. I also read that people did it on a G4. I would make a complete backup first with Carbon Copy Cloner onto a firewire disk (not expensive nowadays for say 40 Gb). You can also shrink with gparted from the Ubuntu liveCD. But as I said, always make a backup.

http://mac.linux.be/content/successf...shrink-g4-mini

**guidop** · June 5th, 2010

Although the Q Guest PC editing tool gives several choices, I've only had success running Q as an x86 processor emulator. Since it's a software emulator, it runs very slowly compared with native the ppc host speeds.

As a test on my 1.8 GHz G5 iMac, Q Version 0.9.1d118:

I downloaded the Puppy Linux 5.01 .iso (x86 only).
(Puppy 5 is ubuntu lucid based.)

Configured Q (Hardware):
- Use the .iso image as the CD-ROM.
- Set Q to boot from CD-ROM
- Set no hard-disk
- Selected PCnet PCI network adapter.

Booted the virtual machine:
- Approximately 1/2 hour to get to desktop
- Approximately another 1/2 hour to use the first run tools to get the network up.
- Approximately another 1/2 hour to select the Puppy Browser as the default and browse to this web-page.

So it is possible to make an x86 linux variant "run" on Q, although "crawl" may be a better term.

Perhaps on your dual G5, it will run a bit faster.

I've also gotten Windows 2000 to run under Q, but it's barely usable, and it runs at about 1/2 the speed of Windows 2000 on Virtual PC 7 for mac (discontinued Microsoft PC emulator).

Edit: Based on the Q Wiki, the Virtualizer portion of the Q project is currently ONLY for x86 virtualization on Intel Macs.