iMac running Ubuntu running MOL running OS X.2.8

I've got the mobo from the iMac 400 running in the 350 shell. It runs fine, it's got 256MB RAM and a 10GB drive. I partitioned it to have OS X sitting on the last 4.5GB (SL iMacs don't care about the 8.4GB thing like TLs and Beige G3s) and left the space between it and the Driver and Patch partitions marked as "Free Space". Then I installed OS X and ran all the updates. Deleted IE too. Then I loaded the Ubuntu 5.04 CD and tried to start from it. The iMac flat refused. No 'C" working here. Tried OF. boot cdrom gave me issues with XCOFF crap and stopped. Then I remembered a trick: boot OF, type mac-boot as if you wanted to boot OS X and hold down 'C' right after you press Return. Bingo! Booted right up from the CD. It seems sometimes OS X plays with the system and things don't want to boot as they should. This iMac would boot from the Ubuntu CD fine w/o OS X on the HDD. Odd.

Then I installed and updated Ubuntu. I had to use https://wiki.ubuntulinux.com/MacOnLinuxHowto to get MOL running but it had some errors with what actually happened. Turns out the .deb package you build gets dropped in the / (root) directory and not in /usr/src so a quick mv /mol-modules-2.6* /usr/src put it where the commands as shown on the site worked. Then it all followed as described, more or less.

I saved a lot of headache by getting OS X going natively instead of installing and configuring it through MOL. I guaranteed that I had a working OS X install before I had to do any trouble shooting of the MOL setup. That would have been a big unknown in the whole mess.

FWIW, this post come curtesy of Safari in X.2.8 through the TUN networking setup of MOL running on Ubuntu. Since the iMac has 256MB RAM I can tell MOL to give it 128MB for OS X and not have it go nuts swapping on the Ubuntu side. It may swap a bit in X, but it would do that anyway.

If I scrounge enough RAM and turn masochistic I might try getting Ubuntu on my 7100/G3-240 machine. THen I could load MOl on it and have OS X running on a VERY unsupported machine. MOL can emulate Old and New World Macs, as long as you have a native PPC CPU. The 7100 should work fine in MOL as long as Linux works. Hello NuBus PMac project on SourceForge!