Ext2: x86 User Installs Linux on an iMac

Written By
RK
Rob Kennedy
Nov 26, 1999

[ Thanks to Rob
Kennedy
for this link. ]

“It’s November, 1999.. my father-in-law has an iMac that he
wants to sell.. I talk him into giving it to me for Christmas.. I
get it early. Mac can’t be all that bad.. if you can run Linux on
it.. and I could use another box. Welp.. what distribution
should I go with for this first generation iMac? I went with
YellowDog Linux since I already had a contact there (Dan Burcaw..
nice guy). I emailed him, and asked for a review copy of “YellowDog
Linux Champion Server 1.1
” (now to be referred to as ‘ydl’ in
this article). A couple days later, I received a totally cool
‘trapper keeper’ of Linux cds/info/bumper stickers. Go take a look
at the site to see this thing (http://www.yellowdoglinux.com).”

“So I decide to go ahead, and plunge into this. I should mention
that without the ‘ydl’ installation notes that came in the
package.. I would have been totally lost in the beginning. Here we
go….”

“I Booted up the iMac with the MacOS cd in the drive, and held
the ‘c’ key to boot off of it (nifty trick). Next was to initialize
the drive. Since it looks like we need to have a minimal Mac OS
installed. I made two partitions with Mac’s ‘drive utility’ program
(one hfs, the other unallocated), and proceeded to install the Mac
OS.”

Complete
Story

RK

Rob Kennedy

Linux Today Logo

LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.

Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2026 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.