I'm getting a little furious about the way it acts Linux at the time I try to install onto my iMac G3.
Yesterday I've installed Debian 7.10 PPC, everytime I turn off the computer and after seeing those boot verbose lines I should see the login screen, but my screen goes turned off.
Any ideas about how can I solve that problem with the screen?
default resolution too high, ie. 1280x900 or similar ?
I used to have the same issue with later versions of Debian and other versions of Linux that I run in Vm environments.
Change your init level to boot into text console and then check the video config files in /etc. Can't remember the name, but it took me a few mins to find in google. In the end I didn't bother with the GUI's, just too much memory hog.
Yup, there is an iMac G3 Xorg cfg file available, with presets for all supported resolutions (up to 1280x900) with the correct refresh rates. It is probably an unsupported video mode that is shutting down your screen.
See here: http://mac.linux.be/content/g3-imac-tray-loader-slotloader-all-versions-...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#How_do_I_configure_an_xorg.conf_file.3F
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=123298
Best of luck!
I do not use New World ROM "Macintosh" Computers (actually PowerPC Reference Platform computers), though running debian on the traditional PowerPC PCI Macintosh computers you can set an option in the bootloader to pass a kernel parameter that causes the kernel and x11 to use the ROM based video driver (part of the Mac OS), and this is a good way to get things working.
If it turns out that the screen resolution is not the problem try it (I think that with new world ROMs it is the OpenFirmware FrameBuffer driver that you want).
I have done a slot-loading G3, and it definitely uses New World (open firmware), and is pretty well supported. I was using a PReP machine, and had to have a tiny MacOS9 install, and BootX took over during startup. If your machine requires this, I used extra parameters at startup, one especially that made a LARGER initrd ramdisk, which was an absolute requirement on a beige G3. I was using Xububtu 7.xx from memory (a community build), and I have an excellent guide on the Ubuntu Forums, which hopefully are up again after their major hack-in.
GREAT GUIDE HERE -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=980622
You may have to read through all the dross, but there is good info in here!
Best of luck.
sorry, here is the main guide -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=980622&p=6174610#post6174610
But... how can I tell Yaboot that I want to enter into console mode?
Once you have Linux installed, you can tell it to boot to console mode (userlevel 3?) usually by removing 'quiet' and placing a 3 at the end of the grub boot.conf file. Whether that exists or not is another matter. There should be plenty of YaBoot docs on the interwebs, and you could install a server (console only) version of PPC Linux, and then add XFCE4 later. You might need Debian to do this (or Ubuntu). Both have server editions available.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=427714
https://wiki.edubuntu.org/PowerPCDownloads
http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/ports/releases/
Make sure you find one with decent repositories, shouldn't be an issue with Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Debian.
Try typing runlevel=3 or just a number 3 at the end of YaBoot kernel args line.
PS. Alternate install iso's have a text-only installer... could come in handy. I believe I used an alternate install for my PReP machine.
PS. Server versions of Ubuntu are very rare and seem to stop at 6.x, so don't bother with that.
If you REALLY must install Linux, I would choose Slackintosh 12.x, as it supports all power features, and EVERYTHING seems to work perfectly out of the box (I had this on my 12" G3 iBook, and EVERYTHING worked perfectly first boot, including hotkeys/sleep)
