I re-ran everything a little while ago. The installer installed everything and it rebooted the pc but I get a blank screen on reboot. I wait and wait and get no graphic at all so tried ctrl + alt + F1 and nothing. Any idea what would keep even the command line from coming up? I figured it was just the xorg not set right but with no command line, I can not check anything. Ideas?

You have to set xorg.conf. What is your exact model of Mac?
Give me a link in everymac.com please.

You installed MintPPC 8 or 9? I now edited the installer for MintPPC 9. It should work now. I would install that, as the software is much more up to date.

Well, took almost three hours at 170kB/sec but the MintPPC 9 download finally kicked over -- after some bumps. Remember when I asked whether we ought flush mint-installer.1, mint-installer.2, etc? Guess what happened? Back to the Future! ./mint-installer tried to run (the old) mint-installer, being totally clueless that the newly wget version was now mint-installer.7! Flushing out these old versions first is mandatory. Between breaks peeking the screen during the install I caught this line passing by-

FATAL: module snd_seq_oss not found

Doesn't seem to've affected anything but you ought know, and I don't know what other FATALs I missed.

Starting network connection manager: wicd failed!

Only green screens all the way! (though still that Lightweight Desktop Environment thing, not a custom Mint thing?) and all the menu icons seem in place, though two or three don't seem to function but I forget which -- a minor one to me, but I'll retrace and check that out later.

We really gotta do something about overidding those Mac partition permissions because that severely cuts Mint's usefulness if you can't access your personal files in there! BTW, getting rid of that persistent "Permission Denied" Error pop-up via the "OK" box or the right-top X is a real hassle and hangs up your windows till you manage to get a lucky click to take it out, and hopefully Debian engineers can take care of that. Only one shot should do it! (update: I think option key-click just did the trick!). GOT to get the secured wireless up! I can only go wireless in unsecured mode. Like Ubuntu 10.04, Mint spits back your WEP passwords! My 900mHz G3 iBook uses Airport if that's a help.

I'm still exploring but so far MintPPC looks really really good, and because it looks so good makes this flaky installer issue all the more tragic because we'll never know the hundreds if not thousands of average folks who caught wind about MintPPC at Ubuntu or where ever and dropped by your site to check it out and got vexed and intimidated and silently walked away because they just couldn't jump all the CLI hoops we did. The only thing that smoothed my way here was using CLI during my old Amiga 500 days. This site ought be bustling with people by now so that's likely a sad testimony of that likelihood, so it seriously behooves you to get as fully automated or non-techie friendly GUI mint-installer in place before this experience creates a bad reputation for MintPPC out there. Don't make non-techie people feel they have to be rocket scientists just to install the thing! Don't force regular people to learn CLI just because it's a snap for techies. (I was very successful in marketing so I'm familiar with consumer issues like this). I'd be happy to serve as a MintPPC Beta tester.

I REALLY want to back this beast up ASAP, speaking of, another feature you can make unique to MintPPC is a MintPPC Partition zipped-backup thingie to a Mac partition or external drive. Right now as far as I know there's no way to backup a Linux partition to an external drive or Mac partition (which is crazy!) so you can also make your mark here too. Eventually if this Mint works out, I have to figure a way of installing it among sixteen plus Macs within my lifetime.

Right now I'm downloading (I think) OpenOffice and Stellarium, putting all through their paces so I'll report on how it goes trying this thing out.

On the whole, a thumbs up from Konata. Good Job!

Jim in NYC

Sorry, thought I said I installed 9 this morning. I can not get to the command line so no idea how to get the xorg.conf file made/edited, or anything. I tried booting in a live environment with Ubuntu live cd 10.04 and made a xorg.conf there, and in root, moved it to the /etc/X11 directory. It is there but not sure why it is not working. Same one that worked in 8... My Mac is this one here http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/p ... 4_500.html
The model is M5884 and this is it. Any idea why no command line at all?

If you have the choice in yaboot, you select your partition and a "1", so for example


This will lead you to single user mode (CLI)

In the command line try:

continue booting

Jim> nice story. You better post several threads for the issues.

To come back to the story of writing to your Mac partition. There is a good post on mac.linux.be about that:
http://mac.linux.be/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=95

Good luck

To back up a Linux partition you might be interested in Partimiage:
http://www.debianadmin.com/backup-and-r ... image.html

Let us know if it works out well for you. If you really like it and other people too, I might want to take it on board of Linux MintPPC.

Sorry I did not get back to you sooner, but I got called into work and had to let this go til this morning.

Ok, where to begin... got into the CLI like you showed me. Got the xorg file you directed me to, the powerbook7.txt. Moved it to X11 as the xorg and nothing... so I went in and edited it and still nothing... I used the exact same xorg.conf that I used when I had 8 running and this time got nothing. I think it will probably work on my 17" PowerBook so I am going to try to install 9 on that... only thing is, I will have to unplug the cable from this computer to plug it into the other PowerBook because the setup does not recognize the wireless card in the 17" PowerBook... so off I go to try that... will let you know in an hour or so how that went