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It was already a year ago that I bought my iMac G3 computer. I got very excited about it because I love computers, in special Macintosh ones. I bought my iMac G3 without software. There was no any Macintosh operating system in it, so, as soon as got this machine in my house I started looking for some GNU/Linux distributions to install in it.

I used to keep some Ubuntu discs that Canonical sent me in the past months. I tried the version 6.06 but it didn’t work in my iMac, so, I decided to look for an older version of it. I found the pocket of Ubuntu’s version 5.04 and I placed the “live-CD” in the nice cd-rom unit. I started my iMac and it booted the live cd. It was a very strong workload to my 256 Mb of RAM, but, I was able to check that Ubuntu was working fine.

These Macintosh machines are pretty advanced in hardware, so, I upgraded it by installing a new hard drive. As soon as I completed this task I installed Ubuntu 5.04. It was a matter of a few minutes to be running Ubuntu in my iMac.

It is amazing how the destiny moves the pieces of the puzzle… There used to be blackouts in my house and my “ext2″ filesystem of Ubuntu got corrupted. I was unable to fix this problem and I lost my Ubuntu. How terrible situation! My Mac was without operating system, again.

I was not really satisfied with Ubuntu. So, I start looking for a distribution that fits better my needs, look and philosophy. I remembered SuSe, Debian, Yellow Dog, CentOS and Fedora as possible distributions to be installed in my PowerPC. For whatever distribution to choose I was sure that I had a few available time to make the installation because I was needing my Mac as soon as possible and to wait 12 hours or more to download a distribution was definitevely no in my plan.

I just remembered Yellow Dog and inmediately discarded it because I dislike its default graphical desktop and I haven’t time to customize it. CentOS and Fedora didn’t have a version for PPC (the architecture of my iMac), so, the only distributions to choose were SuSe and Debian. I was really excited about installing SuSe because this distribution have the coolest KDE “by default” desktop environment that I have seen and checked until today.

I browsed the main page of the project OpenSuse and until to reach the download page. My joy ended very soon when I read:

It was really bad for me, because my iMac has a CD-ROM optical drive, so, it is unable to read any DVD. However, I tried the method “network installation” but my small size CD was unable to boot my computer.

What to do now? My last chance was to install Debian. I entered the Debian website and I found many possible ways to download this distribution. However, I decided to try the network installation by downloading the minimal size image file that packages only the minimal components to start it. I did. I downloaded this +84 Mb image file, burned it to my Verbatim 4x CD-RW and my first Macintosh network installation began.

It was really easy for me to go on the installation program of Debian. I configured the network installation to my nearest mirror and Debian started downloading all the packages I chose. It was natural for me to end the installation process. I just was worried about the installation of the bootloader, but, it smoothly succeed.

The Debian 4.0 installer request to me to restart the Macintosh box. I did it and in a few moments I started to enjoy my ReiserFS filesystem as well as my XFS /home partition. My Debian installation in Macintosh was an entire success.

I understood that “Debian rules” and I am strongly satisfied and able to contribute to the Debian project in as much as I can. This GNU/Linux project released the best example of a portable distribution even for PPC.