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Installing XBMC on an iMac

Since the 700 Mhz Raspberry Pi runs XBMC perfectly, I wondered if it would be possible to run it usefully on the G3 PPC iMac that we have lying around. With two devices, I could also do multi-room music syncing, which might be useful if I have a party coming up, perhaps.

To get Linux on a PPC iMac, you need to get a Debian PPC installer, and burn it onto a USB key.

To get into Open Firmware, you start up the machine with the CMD + OPT + O + F keys - I spent a long time not getting this right because I didn't know which keys CMD and OPT were. The CMD key is the one with the quad cloverleaf, and the OPT is alt key (which has the strange jumping-line symbol as well).

Open Firmware will boot a Debian PPC install USB with the command:

boot usb1/disk@1:2,\\yaboot

(If this doesn't work, the devices might be wrong. Use dev / ls and devalias to find them out).

Then at the boot: prompt you type

install url=mintppc.org

..and that installs mint from the internet.

Then I did this all over again, but this time using the correct debian boot iso to get MintPPC 11 rather than 9. This all worked fine (much more reliably than the 9 install, in fact), but you get a blank screen when it finally tries to boot into the GUI.

Typing Linux 1 into the yaboot gets into single-user mode, and I discover no xorg.conf. Okay, this is going to be a problem.

To be continued...


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