I am just starting this topic to have a place to organize all the avenues attempted in getting MintPPC32 installed and running.
I have an iMac G4 700mhz Geforce2 MX (very first flat panel flowerpot imac), with 768mb pc133mhz, 32gb IDE ssd, and cd-rom. (also use an external dvd-rw firewire drive).
So far i have tried:
1) The deb12-net install with auto settings which did not work.. stuck at failed install. (assuming some packages are no longer available to download hence the "install will fail" banner on website)
2) a very poorly attempted deb12-net manual install.. stuck at same failed install.
3) tried a deb live image I found in the forum. I put the mac in firewire mode and used my powerbook g4 to image the drive using DD over firewire. The boot fails at initialization of of-video driver. I can get a bit further with nomodeset, but then run into an issue where the resolution (or bit-depth) is garbage and makes it unusable. It gets to a screen with an indecipherable window (maybe login prompt?) but i can't get any further ... but this still has gotten the furthest with deb12mint
4) I got ubuntu 12.04 ppc working on a live boot using nomodeset. this also has the issue with bit-depth, but it still was a more or less working dist which allowed me to try and edit settings and cofig files in the debian 12 install that was still in the hard drive. I didn't go much further with ubuntu simply because its so old and lacks the more modern packages in deb 12 which is the whole point of this exercise.
5)I also tried adelie linux ppc. This has the same issue with failing when the graphics initializes.
Next i did a bit more scouring of older forums to figure out why NV11 has so many issues and what other people had done to fix it. what seems to be the cause is nvidia never released PPC drivers and the nouvea drivers aren't the most reliable/usable for NV11 and i get mixed reports of the NV driver working best evidence is this forum post here working NV in lubuntu/debian 7.7
Next I found that a bunch of posts were made regarding downgrading x11 and changing xorg.conf to custom bit depths so fix the resolution/bit depth issue that I am seeing to also have come across. links:
same but mentions yaboot config changes as well
So that is as far as i have gotten over the past few days I've had to sit and tinker because of time off due to H-milton here in FL. I am still new at linux and I am decent at following tutorials but I wouldn't be able to meaningfully figure all this out on my own. I am still very early in trying to learn all of this stuff.
The other thoughts I had/next steps: I am going to attempt to keep playing with teh deb12 live image I found. I would be so stoked to get this working on such old (but yet kinda beautiful hardware) and see if it is actually usable in a fairly modern way (light internet, word processor, etc). Also, I was curious about gentoo because it seems that still has an active ppc32 dist available but requires a bit more technical knowledge than i have right now to set up. ICE-WM as a front-end appeals to me as well because it is supposed to be incredibly light weight and may work well for what my goals are (as a side note i am also trying to get a modern dist to work on a pentium mmx vaio and thats how I came across ice-wm). I am curious to see if I can get that running as well.
Well anyway. Thought I'd post here with any progress I've made otherwise to help the next person. if I find a way to get a good working deb12 install I'll post here.
