I want to install Mint 11 on my Pismo, but on an external FW hard drive. Is this possible? I followed the installation procedure up to setting the root password, but haven't seen a choice of installation destination so far. I fear if I continue, I'll bork up my Mac OS X 10.4 installation on the internal hard drive.

at the point of partition, you should select the external drive.

Hm, now I'm supposed to manually edit one of the partitions on the disk. I have no idea what to do there.

Don't do things you regret later. Always make a copy of your important data before doing this kind of stuff !

Sure. The disk I want to use already has some HFS+ partitions on it, and the Mint installer has a gazillion options to edit each of the partitions manually (e.g the file system), but there is no "default" set I can apply. How am I supposed to know about all that? This can't be a completely uncommon situation for people who install Mint on an older Mac and want to try it out on an external disk first without losing the original OS X installation.

well, if you know how big the external disk is as opposed to the internal hard disk, you are safe to choose that disk and have it partitioned.

The problem is not to tell the disks or partitions apart, but which options to choose when editing the existing partition. I have reserved one partition on the external disk for the Linux experiment, and the other partitions as well as the internal disk are not to be touched. I cannot repartition the external disks from scratch.

ok, then you need to learn about partitioning. Go and have a look at my other website and teach yourself:
http://mac.linux.be
and especially
http://mac.linux.be/content/apple-powerpc-wiki
Yaboot is a good section.

Thanks a lot for your help. Sadly, I don't have enough time right now to learn about this. I wanted to "just install" Mint so I could check it out, like I would install OS X (insert disk, choose destination, click install and go away for a cup of coffee ), but a Linux installation seems to require a bit more knowlege and user interaction than OS X.

I'll try it another time, preferably when I have a disk at hand that's completely empty and doesn't need the special partition editing treatment.

It is no different from what people need to do on other distros, BSDs, Mac OS X, or Windows...



Yes, Mac OS X works nice and easy if your partitions are pre-set. Linux works nice and easy if your partitions are pre-set too.