My kingdom for FDISK

[dolari]

If there's anything Windows XP has taught me, it's how much I miss DOS. And if there's anything this iMac has taught me, it's HOW MUCH I REALLY REALLY REALLY MISS DOS.

Our poor iMac (aka FryMac) has never worked. It freezes constantly, bombs, crashes, and all those other cute little pics when it crashes. Dean gave up on it a few months ago, where I began to think about putting Linux on it Just To Get it Working.

The Lovely #9 sent me an ISO with Max OS 8.6 on it, which was burned on my CD just fine, and I attempted to install it. And there was much gnashing of teeth. Three hours later it was no longer freezing or bombing on me. Cause it was just sitting there on a "?" screen looking for the system folder.

And since I burned the CD on a PC, the CD READ just fine, but it wasn't bootable. Oi. Gimmie a DOS prompt. Just let me SYS C: or FORMAT /S. I'd be up and running in seconds....

That is one thing I like about Linux: Being able to drop to a command prompt and Fix The Damned Problem.

The good news was I found a Mac 8.5 CD on EBay pretty cheaply, so I may have a brand spanking new iMac in a week or two. If not, we'll we'll have a brand spanking new Linux box. :)

Or, if I had my druthers, a damned DOS box.

Speaking of cheap...I've paid rent up to the end of August. The next few paychecks are now all savings checks. Not counting any expenses, my gross pay when the checks stop coming will be $1750. This should last me. That allows me $150 in expenses over 12 weeks. I'm gonna stretch it as much as I go, but that's not a bad allowance, considering groceries and gas usualy comes to $100 or so a week.

I have a good two weeks of Paid Time Off at work. I'm not sure if I get that, being a temp and all, but if I can, I'll take it. If I do get it, I'll give myself a week for detoxing.

If I ever thought twice about my decision to quit, my fears have been put to rest.

Comments

[drkbish.livejournal.com]

That's odd. It shouldn't matter whether you burned the CD using Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. The ISO file itself should contain the bootable image. Either there's something more wrong with the iMac than previously thought, or something went wrong with the ISO creation. (No offense to #9's abilities, BTW... I've made that mistake on at least one occasion.)

I'd probably recommend Yellow Dog if you do try and put Linux on there. If not YD, then maybe Debian.

[iqtech.livejournal.com]

If I ever thought twice about my decision to quit, my fears have been put to rest.

Yay, Jenn! Good for you!

[emilydm.livejournal.com]

I specifically told Toast "make this disk image bootable". But sometimes that doesn't even work, for whatever reason. :P

Jenn, have you tried holding down the "C" key when starting up? The offer still stands for me to burn the disc myself, test it to make sure it works, and mail it off to you.

::hugs::

[emilydm.livejournal.com]

Oh, and did you burn to CDR or CD-RW? I'm unsure whether or not a Revision A iMac will work properly with CD-RW.

[kisai.livejournal.com]

You need to burn the iso as a iso in your cd-burning app. (ie, do not convert to/from anything)

you also need to hold C down to boot the CD on mac's IIRC. I installed OSX on a Mac from ISO's because the discs we had were "update" discs that wouldn't install. Had to burn them with the PC (used nero)

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

It was burned to a CD-R. It's wierd, it SEES it as a Mac CD (My PC won't read it, and the system folders have all their special icons and whatnot), it just won't BOOT to it.

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did the "Hold C down" to boot to CD, I tried "Hold ALT down to get a Boot Menu" I tried ALT+Option+Shift+Delete (which some one SAID forced a D boot, but ended up rebuilding my desktop file instead), and even set the Start Up Control Panel to boot to CD first. Nada. It don't like the CD.

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did burn the ISO directly as an ISO. It recognized it as a "foreign file" which should have been normal.

I did the "Hold C down" to boot to CD, I tried "Hold ALT down to get a Boot Menu" I tried ALT+Option+Shift+Delete (which some one SAID forced a D boot, but ended up rebuilding my desktop file instead), and even set the Start Up Control Panel to boot to CD first. It just doesn't like the CD....

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

If I don't get the MAC OS from EBay, it'll definately be Yellowdog.

[elenderel.livejournal.com]

How totally frustrating. Steve's a self-professed Mac geek - I bet he'd enjoy the challenge of figuring this one out!

I have OS 9.

[orrinbloquy.livejournal.com]

Won't blow up your Mac, will it?

Re: I have OS 9.

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

The poor thing only has 32MB of RAM. I think OS9 will make the poor thing barf....

Ubuntu/Kubuntu both have PPC LiveCD distros.

[orrinbloquy.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a lifetime Mac user and advocate, I think you're better off getting Debian Sarge (now the stable branch) which still only requires 32M and a minimum of 110M HD.

Running a handful of legacy versions of commercial apps versus running modern apps seems like a no brainer to me, unless
A) you have a burning need to run Photoshop 4 on it
B) nostalgia.

I've been running Debian Sarge on a pair of ancient GX1s for about a year now and I'm impressed at what it can do, excepting handling Dell's choice of sound chips (hlp plz?) and trying to install ogle. Too bad there isn't a PPC Knoppix CD for you to play with.

I have a wheezing 300MHz G4 in mothballs (upgraded 7500 circa 1995), but it has a gig of RAM and both the original 1.5Gb HD (OS 9) and a separate internal 37Gb HD (Jaguar). After this week's news I'm sorely tempted to put Sarge on the 1.5Gb and start benchmarking the two *nixes against each other.

Go here:
http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.04/
and scroll down to Live CD for the PPC version. If like me you're more favorable to KDE than Gnome, go to
http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/hoary/
and get the kubunto version instead.

While I'm not personally the biggest ubuntu fan out there, until Knoppix does a PPC port (think Texas freezing over) this is probably the fastest way to decide whether your iMac can handle Linux and you like it enough to take the plunge.

I'm getting and burning a copy now for shiggles (since the Lombard Powerbook in our department doesn't have enough memory to install Jag).

Re: Ubuntu/Kubuntu both have PPC LiveCD distros.

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

>Running a handful of legacy versions of commercial apps versus running
>modern apps seems like a no brainer to me, unless
>A) you have a burning need to run Photoshop 4 on it
>B) nostalgia.

Back when we lived in State College, we only had one computer, a Pentium 1 machine. 1 Mchine between two Internet Users is a bad thing, so I built up an old 386 from parts I had lying around, an installed Win 3.11 on it, IE 5 and and old AIM program on it, and it worked GREAT. We had the Pentium for WORK, and the 386 for Internet browsing when the Pentium was in use.

Eventually, it turned into a "Living Room Portal" and we got REALLY spoiled. Now that we have cable again, and a real router (the old one was using a DCC Parallel Cable Connection!) we were trying to get that "Living Room Portal" going again. Unfortunately the new iMac had serious issues with the OS, where it would freeze constantly loading ANYTHING (sometimes the OS itself), and a lot of other nastiness.

Dean wanted a MacOS on there, which is why I didn't immediately install Yellow Dog Linux on it. Plus he didn't want to spend too much money on it, which is why I didn't get more RAM.

Yeesh, all this for convenience. :D