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I recently acquired a couple G4 "Mirror Door" Macs, and I'd like to use them to start learning about Ubuntu since they won't run Snow Leopard. (it runs 10.5.8 quite nicely, though)

I've downloaded Lucid Lynx and Karmic, made sure they were PPC versions, and they don't do anything on the Mac. I can't get the disk images to burn to CD with Disk Utility, neither will they show up in bootable volumes in the startup disk menu.

So, I downloaded 10.4 Lucid Lynx for Power PC on my Windows machine and burned a disk. The Mac will not boot from the CD no matter what I try.

Naturally, I hit up google for some answers, but the results mostly consist of "download version x and boot from cd, click install", indecipherable gibberish that is way above my level (and doesn't seem applicable in any case), or threads that start with posts such as this one that quickly devolve into trollery.

Is there anyone here who can tell me what I'm not doing or doing wrong in this process? Is there something different I need to do to make a bootable CD? Is there something to adjust on the Mac? Does it matter what application I use to burn a CD, or what settings it has?

Any help, advice, or information will be appreciated. Thanks!

Disk Utility does handle .ISO images and burns bootable disks if the images are made from boot disks, no special setup needed. Perhaps a drive problem?If you have a bootable DVD (or CD) with a non-Apple system on it, I´d not try Startup Disk. Just (re)start the Mac and press and hold the Option key until you see the menu of disks to boot from, then make your choice.

I haven't done this in several years and my memory about the process is a bit fuzzy. But as I recall in order to create a bootable image I had to either...

1. copy a bootable CD/DVD or
2. create a blank image first using a DVD/CD Master image format

When I looked just now I found the DVD/CD Master image format type is still present in Disk Utility 5.11.1 in OS X 10.6.3 but the only available disk formats are variations on Mac OS X Extended and MS-DOS (FAT32) -- no ISO or hybrid disk formats.

As I said it has been many years since I was creating bootable disc images and I may be missing something here, but it may be you will have to use Toast or another third party app to create a bootable CD/DVD in the correct image and disk formats.

Thanks for the advice, guys.

I don't have a copy of Toast at work, so I'll download and burn the ubuntu on my home Mac and see if that creates something that can boot.

Whether it works or not, I'll post the results here soon.

Tune in tomorrow...

"I can't get the disk images to burn with Disk Utility" doesn't give us very much information to go on.

Please describe, in detail, what you have done to try to burn the disc images, and what happened. Do you see an error message of some sort? If so, what does it say?

There are directions for burning an .iso disc image here.




Yes, that sounds right. Windows computers generally can not burn bootable Mac CDs.



It makes a huge difference how you burn the CD!

After you burn the CD, put it in your computer and double-click on it to look at the files on it. If you see the .iso file on it, that CD is useless and can be thrown away. You need to tell your CD burning software "Don't take this ISO file and put it onto the CD; instead, open it up and put its CONTENTS onto CD."

Tacit, thanks for the suggestions.

Here's what I was trying:

(1)Burn .iso from PC- did not work.

(2)Open the downloaded .iso file and then burn the contents to a CD using Toast- also did not work.

(3)Drag the downloaded .iso file to the left column of Disk Utility. Hit the burn button & insert a blank disc.

The first time I tried method 3, the disc would not boot. I could open the CD and see the .iso file, but it wouldn't do anything but show me a bunch of folders that weren't much good to me. This is the point at which I first posted about bootable CD issues.

I can't recall ever before trying to burn a bootable Mac CD before, so my inexperience led me to believe that I was doing something wrong (and my first few tries, I was). But I had explicit directions (including the set Tacit linked to), and am "purdy good at readin werds", so I was perplexed and frustrated about my inability to burn a bootable disc.

Later in the week, I noticed that another disc I burned with the Mac had some corrupt data, so I got to thinking it was the superdrive after all. I replaced the superdrive and burned another Ubuntu .iso CD using method #3. This CD was bootable, and I used it to install the Ubuntu.

So: apparently a supderdrive can work well enough to read everything on a CD, and write well enough to get most of the data across, but not write well enough to make a CD bootable.

More about Ubuntu in the next post.

So, now I've got a G4 Mirror Door running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04

Ubuntu has a pretty interface and is so far pretty easy to find my way around in. Setup for network was simple, and it seems to play well with the Macs and Windows on the local network.

Ubuntu comes with Firefox, Open Office, and some basic print & scan utilities. Most applications seem slow to load, though very responsive once they are up. It feels pretty snappy for the most part.

I can't say I like Ubuntu better than OS X or that I would consider replacing OS X on my primary machine. Most of my work has to be done in Windows no matter what, so it will be difficult to gauge for some time whether Ubuntu is something I'll have any use for.

If anyone has any Ubuntu tips or suggestions to share, I'd be happy to hear it. If I learn anything especially nifty about it, I'll post back here.

Fortunately, it can sit to the side and not be expected to be reliable or do any important work. Ubuntu is a fun toy for now, and I enjoy tinkering with it.