Installing Fedora 9 on the Power Mac G4/466 — Part 1

I didn't have any complaints about the way Debian Etch performed on my new/old Power Macintosh G4/466. The install went smoothly, the system performed better than I had reason to expect with only 128 MB of RAM, and I can unreservedly recommend Etch to anybody with a box of this pedigree (PowerPC) and vintage (circa 2001).

But since this was my first PowerPC install, I can't leave things where they are without taking a few more distros for a spin.

Right now I'm installing Fedora 9. I've been wanting to try it for awhile, and the fact that it is made for both PowerPC and i386 means it's something I could run on the Mac and my laptop, if I decide to go that way.

Update: I was working the nightshift, and I started the installation about 5 p.m. It was still downloading packages when I left at midnight.

I've had great things to say about the graphical Anaconda installer when I was installing CentOS, but the text-mode version on this Fedora-for-PPC network-install disc could be much better.

I guess if I hadn't done maybe 20 Debian and about as many Ubuntu installs over the past two years, I might look less favorably on the text-based installer for both. But I do look on the Debian installer favorably, as I do the installer for CentOS. So it's not about being overly familiar with Debian and not so much with Fedora.

This text-based installer for Fedora 9 on PowerPC is, for lack of a better word, barbaric.

I'm using the network install ISO, and that meant the packages would come over the Internet. I made the mistake the first time of saying that the packages were on the CD, after which the installer told me that no, there were no packages on the disc. It took me a couple of times to figure out that I had to tell the installer that the packages were indeed coming via network.

Couldn't Anaconda somehow figure out that I'm using the network-install disc?

Once I selected network install, I was prompted for information on my network connection; nothing out of the ordinary there.

But then I had to select a mirror. Unlike the Debian installer, in Fedora you don't get a list from which to choose a mirror. You either have the information written down, or you go to another computer and start digging into the documentation to find a mirror.

I did the latter and finally found a proper mirror.

I'm still not all that experienced in rolling my own partitions in PowerPC, so I let the installer set them up for me. It looks like Fedora's default is to go with logical volume management. This might be a good time for me to get schooled a bit on how to work with LVM.

Once I went forward in the install process and chose the desktop selection of packages, the process began. That was a couple of hours ago, and it looks like it's going to be a long wait for all 920 packages to download and install.

I don't know how well Fedora will perform on the G4 with 128 MB of RAM (I've been meaning to hunt down some more memory ...), and that's where this tale will resume.