I’ve read several reports of users who were unable to restore the iPod even to the factory settings after partitioning the iPod with Disk Utility. If you use Disk Utility to format and repartition the iPod, you will likely lose the firmware, and the iPod restore application may not be able to recover your iPod. Disk Utility recognizes only the music partition. First, the big warning: DO NOT PARTITION YOUR IPOD WITH APPLE’S DISK UTILITY! My fourth-generation iPod - as well as other recent models - contains two partitions: one for the firmware and one for the music.
#Install linux on a mac mini powerpc mac os x#
Since most Mac users considering a SUSE install probably won’t want to reinstall Mac OS X from scratch, but may be willing to test it with an iPod installation, I will say a few words about installing SUSE on an iPod. Having seen a tutorial for partitioning an iPod for - amongst other things - Linux installation, I decided to try installing SUSE 10.1 using my iPod as an external hard disk. There was one other testing option before me, however: installation on an external drive. Since my PowerBook doubles as a portable recording studio, I did not want to mess with my OS X installation.
That’s a big commitment! Given the hesitancy with which one may approach a new distribution, one might expect that a PowerPC live CD would be a priority for the openSUSE project, but there is none for version 10.0 or 10.1 for the PowerPC.
#Install linux on a mac mini powerpc full#
A full installation of SUSE on a PowerPC Mac requires a fresh installation of Mac OS X, followed by the restoration of all applications, preferences, and data. With version 10.0, PowerPC support returned to SUSE, but Novell has quite a few kinks that need to be worked out before this distro hums like its x86 counterpart, starting with some killer problems with installation.īefore diving in and installing SUSE 10.1 on my PowerBook, I wanted to take it for a test drive, particularly because SUSE’s installer cannot shrink existing Mac HFS+ partitions on the fly. Instead, SUSE and Novell have focused on x86 (and x86_64) versions of their desktop Linux distribution.
Since version 7, PowerPC versions of SUSE Linux have been conspicuously absent from the SUSE desktop lineup.