Linux on the iMac

My desktop machine at home is a lime green iMac (Slot Loading, G3 350MHz), 64+128M RAM, 6Gb HD, with the added peculiarity of having an azerty (french/belgian) keyboard. Recently the HD died, so I replaced it with an 80Gb Hitachi Deskstar 7K80. The performance improvement is very noticeable. It currently runs Mandriva 2005LE with Gnome 2.8, dual-boot with OS X 10.3.

I also have an old clamshell iBook G3 300MHz, 3Gb HD, and I managed to make it dual-boot with Mandriva 2005LE on a 1Gb ReiserFS partition and Mac OS 9.1 on the rest. ReiserFS is just great, absolutely superior to ext3 for crash recovery and speed.

At work I have an iBook G3 900 MHz a Mac mini both running Ubuntu and Mandriva PPC Cooker.

These pages contain some material and links particular to Linux on the iMac and the PPC platform in general. I'm afraid they become less and less useful with the distros getting better and Apple moving to Intel.

Most useful (I hope) is a short "rescue how-to" in case you have trouble installing/booting, black screen etc.

A more in-depth guide explains how to create an extra partition on your system. It shows how to:

Defragment and resize your MacOS HFS+ partition.
Create a new Linux partition on the free space.
Change your mount table (/etc/fstab) to accomodate the new partition.
Change your Yaboot script (/etc/yaboot.conf).
Move /usr to the new partition.

I also wrote a document explaining the boot process on the iMac (although it's really a lot more general than that). It's a bit rough as yet, I hope to improve it and add more detail.

French/Belgian keyboard

The AZERTY (French or Belgian) keyboard on the iMac is always a source for trouble. The above RPM used to solve all of them. However, for Mandrakelinux 9.1 I didn't get the X keyboard files to work. In Mandrakelinux 2005LE, it's still not completely right. For that reason, I made my own keymap which I load on login with

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

Here are all files pertaining to my setup:

My X keyboard map (~/.Xmodmap)
My X startup file (~/.xinitrc). I use autologin with xinit instead of startx, and load my keymap in the .xinitrc.
To use the console keymap from the RPM, I added following line to my rc.sysinit:
/bin/loadkeys /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/mac/azerty/mac-fr-ext_new.kmap.gz
I guess it's better to put it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local rather rc.sysinit, but I rather heavily hacked my rc.sysinit for other reasons anyway.
If you're still running a 2.4 kernel, make sure you have the next line in your /etc/sysctl.conf:
dev.mac_hid.keyboard_sends_linux_keycodes = 1

Without this line, your keyboard is a total mess.