Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

[Maxxarcade]

I have an old cobbled up Mac that I assembled from parts I picked out of the trash. It is a Power Mac 5200 case with a built in monitor, and a motherboard from a 6500, with a 250Mhz PPC chip and 128MB ram. I was actually dumb enough to buy brand new ram for it fairly recently, since it needed 5V chips.

Anyway, it runs OS9, and it is slow as hell. But the problem is, I want to use Firefox and some other stuff that will not work on OS9. Will it work any better with Linux?

I'd like to get a G3 upgrade card for it, but it's not worth the money. This is another one of my junk systems that belongs in te trash, but I just can't bear to toss it because it works

[pentium]

Re: Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

I got a 5200 with the origional board running at 75 mhz and with 64 megs ram.
system 8.1 is pretty slow but with internet explorer for mac I can bog the system down so much it will hang. and need to be manually switched off.
unless you have the system 9 cd, I recommend you just wipe the drive, install OS8, patch to 8.1. If you are still using the original hard drive (in my case it was a slow connor drive), replace it. I have a 3 gig maxtor working perfectly in my system. Also be aware that the IDE bus is only a mere 8-bit. I forget if it was in the OS8 cd or included with the 8.1 update (which is still avalible) but you get a copy of internet exploere for mac. My 8600 is running it and my only complaint is I can't get support for java or flash anymore.

[Spacedye69]

Re: Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

Check out Yellow Dog linux. It should run OK.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

I got a 5200 with the origional board running at 75 mhz and with 64 megs ram.
system 8.1 is pretty slow but with internet explorer for mac I can bog the system down so much it will hang. and need to be manually switched off.
unless you have the system 9 cd, I recommend you just wipe the drive, install OS8, patch to 8.1. If you are still using the original hard drive (in my case it was a slow connor drive), replace it. I have a 3 gig maxtor working perfectly in my system. Also be aware that the IDE bus is only a mere 8-bit. I forget if it was in the OS8 cd or included with the 8.1 update (which is still avalible) but you get a copy of internet exploere for mac. My 8600 is running it and my only complaint is I can't get support for java or flash anymore.

Ya the original board was 8 bit, but not the 6500 board that I'm using. I parted out the old 5200 board cause it was a POS. In fact the 6500 board has PCI, so I installed a 10/100 lan card.

I do have the original hard drive with OS 8.1 on it stashed somewhere.

[pentium]

Re: Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

I would upgrade mine but wasn't the motherboard in the 5300 the last to use PDS?
My board has the MPEG option installed and going PCI would make it useless.

[Paul S]

Re: Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

A lot of Linux distros have versions for PPC. If you want to try Ubuntu, it will boot into a "Live CD" mode so that you can check it out before installing it. Be forewarned, the Live CD runs entirely on the RAM. With only 128MB RAM, it will be slow.

Here's the Ubuntu download page, make sure to select the proper system (PowerPC):
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Paul

[pentium]

Re: Linux on a Power Mac 6500?

Minimum for ubuntu on a mac is a G3 cpu.