Installing on a Mac

[zeolite]

I recently purchased a second hand iMac on eBay. When it arrived the previous owner had deleted the contents of its "applications" folder, presumably so as not to distribute any commercial software that had been previously installed. However, by doing this he had inadvertantly deleted the program/libraries necessary to connect to the internet. Since I did not have a copy of MacOS handy I decided to just go ahead and wipe the HDD and install Linux, since I could not make the thing any less useful than it already was. The problem was came when I tried to install it. It would always crash at some point during the installation, no matter what distribution I used. I'm pretty sure it is because the CD drive is old and tired and throws an error at some point when reading the entire contents of an install CD. I tried getting around this problem by creating a Lite install CD so that the rest of the packages could be downloaded from the internet, therefore minimizing the amount of data that would have to be read from this useless old DC drive. However, this stil has not resolved the issue. I am relatively new to Linux. Any thoughts guys?

[techieMoe]

The first thing I would check is to make sure you're trying to install the PowerPC (PPC) version of Linux rather than the X86 (i686/i586/i486/i386) version. Older Macs use PowerPC chips.

[zeolite]

Thanks for such a quick reply. Yep, I'm using the PowerPC distribution.

[HellioN]

Debian has what they call the "netinstall" version.
It's small (200 MB or less) & only installs the bare system, You use apt-get to install everything else.
I used to run this on my G3 powerbook & it worked quite well.

http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

[samuraiBSD]

you may want to try ordering a Boot CD from the Ubuntu website. That way you'll know it's not a disc error.