I got myself a new computer yesterday!

OK, fair enough – it’s not brand new.
It’s an iMac G3 with a 400 MHz processor, a so-called “Blueberry”. It was released in late 1999, and I remember thinking “Holy shit! That’s a sexy motherfucker!” when it came out. It’s got a 10 GB hdd, 64 MB of memory, a slot-in CD-Rom, “Fast Ethernet”, FireWire and USB.

I am planning to install linux on this machine, and set it up in my oldest kid Atari’s room. The reason I want to run a linux distro on it is simply because that will make it run smoother and more up-to-date than if I use Mac OS 9.

Now…
I’ve been trying four different distros today – openSUSE 11.1, Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 11 and Debian 5.02. All of these were available for a PPC architecture, and I thought it’d be a simple job installing it. At least Debian, which has a lot of configuration possibilities during install, so I could remove crap I don’t need that would only eat from the performance pie.

Well, it looks like it’s an impossible job with the current specs…
I only have 64 MB of memory, and that seems to be just a cunt hair too little for these four distros.

I tried a minimal Debian install just now, giving up the GUI and everything, planning to go from command-line and then apt-get X.Org and Fluxbox and stuff, but the machine just hangs at 1% during installation of necessary software even before I reach the command-line.

SO…
I guess I need more memory, then.
I’ve found some on eBay, but I just know that somebody’s got to have an old computer stashed away somewhere, so I am currently mailing all my geek friends to track down two 512 MB PC100 SDRAM chips.

If I get my hands on two of these, I can max out The Berry, and run just about any ppc-linux on it. I’ll maybe even hook it up with a larger drive.

Bottom line:
If you happen to have some 256 MB or 512 MB PC100 SDRAM laying around and would like to donate it to my little project here – please ship me a mail and we’ll sort out the details.