Do you ubuntu?

[j4]

I've been watching (mostly via her twitterings on the subject) the saga of famous librarian Jessamyn installing Ubuntu on a library computer; it's a heartwarming tale, but it's made a kind of bittersweet parallel to my own tale of woe as I've completely failed to get anything other than OS 9 installed on my old G3 Mac, due to its apparent inability to boot from anything other than its own 60GB-of-pure-stubborness hard drive. (It's a long, frustrating and not terribly interesting story.) Today, even the Motley Fool is raving about Ubuntu. I feel as though someone's laughing at me.

Comments

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Have you not tried setting up the CD drive as start-up disk, and then rebooting while keeping "option" and "C" pressed on your keyboard with the OS X disk in?

Also - does your Mac have a DVD drive? X is infinitely easier to install from a DVD!

[j4.livejournal.com]

Have you not tried setting up the CD drive as start-up disk, and then rebooting while keeping "option" and "C" pressed on your keyboard with the OS X disk in?

Gnnnnggghhhhhh. YES, FUNNILY ENOUGH, I HAVE TRIED THIS. I have also tried rebooting with shift-command-option-delete, and various other arcane options gleaned from the murky waters of the internets; I have tried setting Startup Disk from within OS 9; I have tried 'boot cd' from Open Firmware; I have tried zapping the PRAM, doing an OF 'reset all', and then trying all the above again. Every time it boots, the CD spins up, the screen sproinks like it's degaussing, everything pauses tantalisingly as if it's considering booting from the CD, and then it boots from the HDD.

It's a beige G3, so no, it doesn't have a DVD drive, and while I suppose I could try to beg/borrow/steal a SCSI DVD drive from somewhere and whack that in instead of the CD, I don't have much hope of persuading it to boot from something other than its native drives if it won't boot from the ones it's got.

And I'm not trying to install OS X, I'm trying to install Ubuntu; I was trying to boot from an OS 9 install CD so that I could repartition the drive and go for dual-boot.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'm installing ubuntu on my desktop at the mo! (Already have gentoo courtesy of Duncan but I'd rather have something I can hope to learn to manage myself). And I just gave it to a relative on a recycled computer!

I feel all relevant and um, what was the word? Zeitgeist