[conspire] imac Firewire Enclosure

[Ross Bernheim]

On Sep 24,  02006, at 10:49 PM, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting John Andrews (jla1200 at netzero.net):
>
> [External drive addressable as either a Firewire or USB device:]
>
>> seconds. Now my question is will the ppc installer recognize and  
>> give me
>> the option to install to that external drive? Should I partition it
>> beforehand?
>
> I would guess any reasonably modern distro would recognise it.  Try  
> and
> see.
>
> Any such distro will let you partition it, so you needn't prepare it
> beforehand.
>
>> How should I partition it to accept about 6 different distros and
>> boot sectors , plus the rest  for lets say mp3 files. Is it possible
>> to boot that that many without getting screwed up? Would grub do it?
>
> Oddly enough, I'm surprised to learn that GRUB (2.x only) _does_  
> work on
> PowerPC, but the more conventional bootloader on that platform is
> yaboot, in my experience.
>
> Since I personally don't really like complex multiboot configurations,
> and tend to think they're a mistake, I'll let someone else address  
> your
> question about that.  (In brief:  When you're new to Linux and things
> are already complex, why _on Earth_ would you introduce an additional
> accident waiting to happen and order-of-magnitude increase in system
> complexity in the form of such a configuration?)

I agree with Rick about adding the extra complexity. It would be much  
easier
to use another external fire wire drive to hold another distro.

There are not too many distros that support the PPC architecture. Of  
those
the Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu and Yellow Dog appear to be the best choices.
Given your hardware, I would look very closely at Xubuntu. The xfce  
desktop
is much faster than KDE or Gnome on your machine.

If you wish to persist in having more than one distribution on the  
external hard
disk drive, check with Bruce Coston or Daniel Gimplevitch for help  
with that.

Ross