[conspire] imac Firewire Enclosure

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:47:10 -0700, John Andrews wrote:

> I was trying to install  ppc Ubuntu on the external FW drive enclosure
> last meeting. Very good food by the way. Thanks to everyone who
> contributed to that effort.We had no luck getting the drive to be
> recognized by Mac Os 9.1.even with some expert help.  However after I
> upgraded to Os 9.2.2 the drive came right up on the desktop and was
> recognized in both FW and Usb1 modes.I also initialized it in about 5
> 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? 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?

Grub on PowerPC isn't ready for prime time, and may never really be,
thanks to the development team's past decision to snub Ethan Benson and
his prom-libc project. I don't know that you'd be able to find 6 really
usable distros for PowerPC. At my direction, Karsten already partitioned
the drive somewhat, but you would want now to delete all partitions on
it except sda1. That drive will very likely always remain nearly empty
unless you do one or both of two things: 1) Load it up with tons of music,
or more easily, tons of video. 2) Allocate part of it for an installation
of OS X. As I recently said on this list, OS X is pretty much the only
thing that never has any trouble booting from FW. The upgrade from 9.1 to
9.2.2 could not have affected how Linux sees the drive, but it may very
well work now for unrelated reasons.