Help

Hi, I'm new to mac and ubuntu. I recently was given a recycle imac no cd's,keyboard,mouse. low and behold to my surprise it does not have an operating system is it possible to install ubuntu with out the mac cds. If so how? I've Googled it the search turns up that i need to invest in os 9 and os 10 which is 200 bucks I'm not willing to spend. any ideas or suggestions?

I would think that you can download the Ubuntu disk and try to see if it will boot up. You may have a problem with lack of ram and need to go to another distro. It you have 256MB you will probably have to use the alt. install disk. It won't take you long to find out. When you have the disk if you encounter problems come back to the forum with your questions. I believe I have seen threads where people are running Ubuntu on that equipment.

thanks for the fast aid. I downloaded the disk and still no go. i get a flashing folder now. I tried the alt download disk and still the same problem. Any ideas on what's wrong?

Without knowing your machine's specs, are you prepared to put in a bit of effort and possibly money to possibly get the equivalent of a 700mhz pc with 64mb of ram that won't do flash or 3d?

You'll want to take a look at the following wikis to get an idea of what you might be facing:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnownIssues and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads

I'll assume you have attached a keyboard and a mouse - they don't have to be Apple. You'll need to burn your download as an iso-image (not just copied over), and hold down the "C" key while booting. Tips for burning (it can be on another machine as you have already done) :

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto

AND, you may want to see if you can narrow down what your machine's specs are - although you probably don't know if the ram and/or hard drive has been upgraded:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/index-imac.html

Depending on which model you have, if your hard drive has been upgraded beyond oem, you may have to do custom partitioning to keep the root partition below 8gb, typically make it 7.5gb to be safe.

If this is your first time installing, I'd suggest a practice run with Ubuntu 6.06x for ppc. Even better these days for that type of machine is Debian 4.0r5 (soon to be 4.0r6):

http://www.debian.org/distrib/

I guess this covers everything so far...