External HD

[lloydchristmas9]

Hi there,
Have just started university and will be using linux quite a bit, so thought it would be a good idea to use my powermac g5 instead of a slower windows pc i have. i am paranoid of ruining my rather expensive g5 however so i am going to install linux on a completely seperate HD to OSX. The question i have is, can it be installed like OSX to an external hard drive and boot from that?

[Zakarth]

Well Apple has a weird boot scheme, if the OpenFirmware allows you to boot from an external hard drive (which I'm pretty sure it does) then yaboot should be able to work the same way if need be. I've seen the apple guys at the "Genius Bar" boot from an external hard drive so it ought not to be a big issue to set it up the same way.

All things being said, if you use YDL 4.0 you ought not to have any issues doing a split partition and preserve your Mac OS X installation without any problems. I've read some other posts that say doing a split partition with FC4 is possible, but I haven't personally seen it work (well, heck just wiping out the whole thing and installing fresh still gave me some issues with FC4), but I know YDL 4.0 should work out of the box like that.

So six of one half a dozen of the other. YDL 4.0 can be downloaded from www.linuxisos.org I believe.