My Friend John (BeeJay) has just managed to get Ubuntu running on his oldworld G3 Tower Mac. He's a Unix man but doesn't know that much about Macs which were made after the mid 80s. (He's got some of the early Macintosh and Apple computers in his collection). Anyway - after digging around a bit he's finally managed to get Ubuntu running.
Instructions for it are here.
I know several other people have done it but to my knowledge no-one yet has put a "how to" up. Since Ubuntu is designed for a modern "new world" Rom it was a bit of a challenge but he seems to have done pretty darned well. The only drawback compared to a later machine is that you have to keep a Mac boot partition and a Mac OS installed so that BootX can do it's thing.
Nikki
There doesn't seem to be a link in your post for the instructions.
I'd be tempted to put it on one of my Beige G3s or even my 9600/300, but have not tried yet.
i've been trying to do the same thing, BUT, on a 5500/275 which also has a G3 upgrade (un-installed at the moment). i got as far as the bootloader, and then well, just got lost-the instructions on the ubuntu wiki "OldWorldMacs" are pretty vague and require command line/*nix knowledge which i can handle (i've moved my users folder to a second partition and re-partitioned an iPod using terminal) - if the instructions are clearly laid out. as far as i know this machine is supported. i do have the option of trying this on a G3 MT, but the 5500 is an all in one, and the challenge of running ubuntu on it, is definately intriguing. if you can sort out the link and/or info it would be good to have it widely available...thanks.
oh - sorry folks - looked like the URL got stripped because I didn't realise that the a href tag wasn't allowed *looks sheepish*
Here the link is again
http://www.gifford.co.uk/~coredump/beigeg3.htm
He's got a main site at www.gifford.co.uk/~coredump/ of course
I wrote a quick How-To back in Sept. for 5.04, and I put an update for 5.10 when I got those CDs.