iMac G4 dual boot

[Meldar]

I just got an iMac G4 (PowerMac 6,1); it's the one with the LCD on a moving arm, and I have to say I quite enjoy its aesthetics. After playing around with it, decided to just put Tiger on it, and it's running great. There are absolutely no problems with the system. It is in perfect condition, and frankly that surprises me (but I'm not complaining )

Now, the backstory is a bit more involved. It's my boss's old machine, and she gave it to me with a totally blank drive. My co-worker and I put Debian PPC on it, but I didn't really like that since there seemed to be no way to increase color depth and I'm not as familiar with Debian as other distros. I got rid of Debian entirely when I installed Tiger, though there is now a second empty partition on the disk.

I'd really like to dual-boot this machine, though, preferably with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, as I have a working LiveCD and have used it before. I know it will run that just fine.

Thing is, I'm a bit inexperienced with OpenFirmware (specifically yaboot). I've searched around a bit and found that if there are two OSs installed, a simple edit of yaboot.conf will enable me to choose which to boot at startup.

Problem is I think I destroyed the bootstrap partition when I installed Tiger. There are currently 3 partitions on the disk:

I'd intended to have 4 by dividing the free space at the beginning of the drive into two parts with one being only about 5MB for bootstrap as it was with Debian. Right now it's got 28.17GB at the beginning and 10.49GB at the end with a roughly-38GB HFS+ partition with 10.4.11.

Enough rambling about my new toy...

First, I'd like to know if it is actually possible to dual-boot with Ubuntu and Tiger.

Second, if it IS possible, then I'd like to know if it's actually as simple as installing Ubuntu on the bigger blank partition and selecting which to boot at startup. I'm really not willing to "just try it" because that might mess up my Tiger install, or else I might get lost in a sea of code and configurations...

Thanks in advance

 

[gsahli]

Debian and Ubuntu use yaboot for PPC. yaboot requires a small partition called "bootstrap" for the yaboot bootloader. I guess the 10.49GB partition could be partitioned for that.

If you're not willing to "try it," I can't be of further help, because I've never gotten the ubuntu to successfully install on my G4 MDD. Only Debian.
The problem with resolution on Debian can be fixed by finding a xorg.conf file on the web and saving it as /etc/X11/xorg.conf. That's what worked for me. There's very little difference between Debian and ubuntu. I'd go with what works.

 

[Meldar]

Oh I am going to "try it." I just wanted to be sure it would actually work first!

My concern was how to implement yaboot into bootstrap in such a way that I could easily choose between OSX and Ubuntu at startup. The way you talk about it, it appears this can be done so I may as well go ahead with the plan!

As for xorg, yeah I know that. I must have done it wrong, since it kept telling me to install xfree86 and I don't think that'd work on PPC. Perhaps I missed a step somewhere. I AM a bit of a Linux noob, unfortunately, hence me now wanting to go back to Ubuntu.

Thanks!