hi copperlion,
Sorry I didn't see your reply right away. I got sidetracked from my G3 adventures.

Let me reply to your post. Yes updates worked out fine until I tried to update the whole system. Then I got a message saying that the updates were not compatible with the current system or something to that effect. After some tweaking, the system updates required manual intervention but there were so many conflicts that I decided it was not going to work.

I am still not positive why the gnome desktop applets got corrupted. I couldn't even repair it with a rescue boot. These corruptions prevented me from accessing the desktop and other places on the system.
Finally after a few clean installs I got it right. SUSE 10.1 works great on a Mac G3 B&W rev 2 with 8GB of memory and 512 mbs of RAM.

Holding 'C' down never did a thing for me! Before I knew it was a rev 2 G3 I tried holding 'D' down as well.
I've tried zapping pram 3 times in a row, booting into safe mode, and a host of other approaches.

Once I got SUSE working, I wanted to update to 10.3 but it is only available on DVD. I had an external DVD drive but I could never get it to boot SUSE 10.3 from DVD.

As time went on, I decided that I wanted a MAC OS on this G3 anyway because I have a client who wants to use some MAC-only online service for his website. So I figured this could be my cheap ticket to helping him out without paying 1000s for a MAC.

But I could not get any of the MAC OSs I burned to CD to boot from YAST.
So I tried to just get rid of Linux altogether hoping a blank disk would make these MAC OSs work. But they never did. Could be just bad discs but I'm using original IMAC software restore discs as well. I tried resetting the system after formatting the drive but no luck so far.
I'm pretty sure that 9.2 should work on this G3 for sure. Mac OS X 10.3 Tiger may or may not work from what I've read.

Most recently when I reboot the G3 I just get the openfirmware screen. I've tried resetting the system from here as well.
I tried disconnecting the Hard drive to force a CD install.
No luck yet.


Anyway if you want to format a Mac drive running linux here is the way--this is originally from http://ask.metafilter.com/58998/Reinstall-...nstalling-Linux

[quote]One thing you can try would be to wipe the drive from within Linux; this will erase EVERYTHING.

Boot up Linux, open a terminal, and type 'mount' by itself, and hit enter. You'll get a list of mounted partitions, which will tell you what your devices are. (I've never used Linux on a G4, so I'm not sure how the devices come out.) An example from an x86 box:

/dev/sda5 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)

You'll probably see a lot of lines, but you want the one that says "on /" in the middle. That's your root partition and is most likely your boot disk.

In my line above, the /dev/sda5 partition is mounted as /; that's the "5" partition on the "sda" device. sda is the whole disk; 5 is one of the partitions.

What you want to do is wipe out your equivalent of sda; it could be hda, or it could be something else. (I'd guess it's most likely to be hda.)

Once you know your target device, type:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512

and hit enter. Substitute your device for sda, of course.

Warning: this will destroy all data on the drive.

Let that run a minute or so, and then just do a hard power off on the machine; there's no point in trying to shut down, as you've just blown away the entire drive. The machine will crash very shortly anyway.

That should wipe out all partitioning information from the drive and should let you reformat it with the Mac utilities. I can't absolutely promise, because Mac G4 hardware is strange to me, but I'm pretty sure it'll work.
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As for the CMOS battery, well I actually took it out about 12 hours ago hoping this will reset the system. But if CMOS wasn't working then I couldn't access openfirmware right? Or at least I couldn't run any commands from open firmware which I have.

As for Samba, well I followed one tutorial which involved assigning static IP addresses to all the windows machines in the network. Then you're supposed to configure Samba with Swat, but Swat seemed to lack some of the functions listed in the tutorial so I'm still a bit hazy on that.

As it is, I know have a G3 with a wiped drive. When I try to install Mac OS 9.2 or Mac OS X 10.3 Tiger from discs I burned using an ISO image, there is not way to force the install. I merely get a folder with a blinking MAC face/question mark.

I'm waiting to get a new HD and see if that changes anything.

I found that Ubuntu running on another PC was much easier to network on a windows network than SUSE on a powermac.

Well thanks for giving it a whirl anyway. Jeez this was so long ago I wonder if you'll even know replied to your post?