Dual Booting Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Ubuntu 10.04 on iBook G3 Dual USB
I was gifted with an old iBook G3 with a dead hard drive. After dismantling the case (60 screws, 60 minutes of prying + hammering + angst) and discovering the hardware setbacks (IDE, USB 1.1, 9ooMHz, 256MB RAM) and software setbacks (PowerPC, only compatible up to OS X 10.4.11, 3 reinstalls to get dual booting to work, no support for Android SDK and god knows what else) I almost considered it more of a curse than a gift. Anyway here’s my process and findings. I decided to install a new HD, blast it, start from scratch. Back up your data before proceeding, everything’s getting blown away!
Dual booting:
1. Insert Tiger install CD/DVD, power down, power on, hold “C” to boot from disc.
2. Open “Disk Utility”. Make 3 partitions: one HFS+ (16 MB, for bootloader), one HFS+ for OS X (you choose size), leave the rest as free space (will make an Ubuntu partition later, plus any others you desire)
3. Finish installing OS X
4. Download and burn Ubuntu 10.04 Alternate disc for PowerPC. (I tried the live disc, but it ran ridiculously slowly under this hardware configuration)
5. Power down, power on, hold “C” to boot from disc. Let it guide you through installing Ubuntu. The only part you need to pay attention to is the hard drive partitioning. Be sure to mark your 16MB partition as the Newworld boot partition. Create your Ubuntu partition (“Use as /”) as well as a swap partition ( >= 2GB) and any others you need.
6. When Ubuntu finishes, reboot. You should see the Yaboot PPC Bootloader come up. (Don’t panic if you can’t boot into OS X at this point, just press “L” and “enter” to boot Ubuntu)
7. In Ubuntu, open Disk Utility and check your install HD. You should see multiple partitions. Look for a partition in front of your OS X partition (it’s 160MB in size). This contains OS X boot info. Check what partition number it is (/dev/hda <- some number). Now open Terminal and enter the following:
sudo nano /etc/yaboot.conf
find the line “macosx=/dev/hda4″ (may be hda, some other number) and replace the number with the one you just checked. press CTRL + O, enter, CTRL + X. Now do:
sudo ybin
to load the config file into Yaboot. Reboot the iBook. Tada! OS X now boots as well.
8. Run updates on both OS’s.
Wifi Fix for Ubuntu 10.04
I’m not sure if my PCMCIA wifi card is a legitimate Apple Airport card (its a 2WIRE PCMCIA card case, wrapped in duct tape), yet OS X and Lynx recognize it as an Airport. So I’m posting what I did to get wireless working in Ubuntu (after booting, it would see wireless networks, but never successfully connect).
In Terminal:
sudo mv /lib/firmware/agere_sta_fw.bin /lib/firmware/agere_sta_fw.bin.bak
sudo pccardctl eject
sudo pccardctl insert
Now reboot. You may have to do this again after running updates. For me, Ubuntu un-did these changes when I ran initial updates.
Conclusion: Ubuntu boots within seconds. Runs a little laggy, but with 256MB RAM, I guess I can’t complain. Yaboot has some interesting features, perhaps I will post more once I finish updates and start goofing around with it.
Hi Jason..mark here.. I have a iBook G3. I have tried your solution for the wifi.. It worked for a moment but After i rebooted a few times…I didnt see any wireless connections at all. Im back at square one and now not showing any nearby connections. Did this happen to u?
Thank you!
android…
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android said this on December 3, 2011 at 5:18 pm |
Jason,
A big part of your problem is the 256 megs RAM. Your iBook should have one SODIM slot underneath the metal plate that is underneath the WiFi card. You can put a 512 meg SODIM in there and that will boost your performance immeasurably.
A word of caution to those out there wanting to try this:
There are a number of partitions on the hard drive that – when installing Ubuntu / Xbuntu / etc.buntu appear to be “free space”. They’re not actually free since the Mac’s native OS (Free BSD) uses a completely different kind of partition structure than a “normal” PC. (For those of you who have had the joy of formatting and partitioning a drive on an UltraSparc, you will know what I mean – the structure is eerily similar.)
If you mess with those “free space” partitions – which actually contain information about the partitions in question – you run the risk of borking the box to the point of needing to a wipe – partition – reinstall, since these partitions are not actually free – they contain important partition structure information. They just show as free in Ubuntu because the Linux partitioner doesn’t know what to do with them,
Here is what I did to avoid this:
(1) I made sure that any partitions that contained important data had been backed up to .dmg files. (Download SuperDuper to do this)
(2) I totally re-partitioned the drive. In my case I wanted TWO OS-X partitions, (as I had a configured system, but wanted to play with a new install as well) I also wanted a partition for Xbuntu and one for swap.
(3) After I had booted the Tiger install CD, I opened Disk Manager, selected “Partition” and then selected the “5 partition” template from the drop-down.
(4) I re-arranged the partitions so that the first one was 16 megs – named “New World”, the next two were 19 gigs each named “New Tiger” and “Old Tiger”
(5) I made the last partition 2 gigs in size, and named it “Linux Swap”
(6) The large partition left I named “Xbuntu”
(7) I formatted them like this:
(a) Partitions 1, 2, and 3 as Mac Extended (or HPFS extended)
(b) Partitions 4 and 5 I formatted as “Unix Format”
(8) I then proceeded to do a fresh install of Tiger into the “New Tiger” partition, and performed an image restore (from the CD’s Disk Manager), to the “Old Tiger” partition. Verify that both can boot.
(9) I loaded the Xbuntu Live disk. With 640 megs, (the max on my system), it runs reasonably well.
(10) When I got to the partition creation stage, I went to “Advanced” to do the partitions manually.
(11) You will see a whole bunch of partitions, many of them labeled “free-space”, Leave the free-space partitions alone!
(12) The first non-free partition should be 16 – 17 megs in size. Mark this as the “New World Boot Partition”
(13) Leave the rest of the HPFS+ formatted partitions alone.
(14) Locate the two partitions labeled as “unknown”. The first one should be huge and the second one should be 2 gigs in size.
(15) Select the first (huge) “unknown” partition and change it to an ext-4 (or whatever) partition mounted at root “/”. Be sure to select “Format this partition”
(16) Select the second “unknown” partition (two gigs in size) and change that to “Linux Swap”.
At this point you can continue the install using Jason’s instructions. If you don’t need two OS-X partitions, select a 4 partition scheme and size things accordingly. (First partition 16 megs, last partition 2 gigs, and the two in the middle any way you like.)
By doing this, you avoid messing up the hidden system partitions that contain all the metadata for the partition structures.
What say ye?
Jim (JR)