Fedora on PowerMac G5

lgwells1 said:

I tried Fedora 20 the other day at work and liked it so much I wanted to put it on my G5 at home. I have heard success stories online, but I am having issues booting into Linux. First here are some specs on my G5.

PowerMac 7,2

PowerPC 970 (2.2) Processor
Dual 1.8GHz Processors

3GB of Memory

GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card w/ 64MB VRAM

2x 160GB HDD

When I boot and hold down Option/Alt to select a boot device, my Linux live CD never shows. Here are a list of things I have tried.

Fedora 20 64Bit Live CD
Fedora 19/20 64Bit PPC Live CD
Fedora 16 64Bit PPC Live CD
Target Disk Mode my MacBook Pro with each CD using FireWire cable
Fedora 16 64Bit PPC Bootable USB

What can I do to boot into a Fedora Linux Live CD or USB. I don't mind what version of Fedora, as I am hoping I can upgrade it to 20.

Click to expand...

How are you burning the disks? I assume that you are downloading an image file, usually an .iso file.

You might try booting into Open Firmware and then entering this


This will manually specify the boot path and will try to load the GRUB bootloader.

Use a USB stick

lgwells1 said:

I tried Fedora 20 the other day at work and liked it so much I wanted to put it on my G5 at home. I have heard success stories online, but I am having issues booting into Linux. First here are some specs on my G5.

PowerMac 7,2

PowerPC 970 (2.2) Processor
Dual 1.8GHz Processors

3GB of Memory

GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card w/ 64MB VRAM

2x 160GB HDD

When I boot and hold down Option/Alt to select a boot device, my Linux live CD never shows. Here are a list of things I have tried.

Fedora 20 64Bit Live CD
Fedora 19/20 64Bit PPC Live CD
Fedora 16 64Bit PPC Live CD
Target Disk Mode my MacBook Pro with each CD using FireWire cable
Fedora 16 64Bit PPC Bootable USB

What can I do to boot into a Fedora Linux Live CD or USB. I don't mind what version of Fedora, as I am hoping I can upgrade it to 20.

Click to expand...

"Only 64bit machines (Power5 or newer) are supported, but we still provide 32bit packages. The last Fedora release with 32bit boot images was Fedora 17. Although it might be possible to install a 32bit F17 release and then update with the latest packages, this is not supported by the Fedora PPC developers anymore. Interested developers might also be able to create their own 32bit boot images for the latest Fedora release with pungi but this is also not supported by the Fedora PPC developers.

Fedora 18 and newer also includes several optimized packages for Power7 machines. These will be installed automatically if a Power7 processor is detected. "

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC

G5's are Power4

What about Fedora do you like? There are only a few Linux distros that support the Mac. Power is still used in HPC and Red Hat is all over HPC and Servers not oldish Mac's.