Anyone with PPC 10.1 Alpha 4?

I feel like a total noob which is 'humbling' after nearly 20 yrs Mac, 5 yrs OS X, and 20 yrs before that on mainframe applications. So I am ~60 yrs old and looking to learn something new.

I printed out the various how to use pdisk, enough to get Alpha3 installed but not configured, when I found this forum.

I have a G4 MDD OEM Radeon 9000, ViewSonic VE800 (native 1280x1024 60 or 75 Hz, Auto-adjust) connected with a ADC-2-VGA adapter.

2 x ATTO UL3Ds with multiple SCSI drives (no internal drives). I may need to put a 120GB ATA drive in just for experimenting with SuSE.

Does OS X Startup Disk recognize the small 39MB HFS boot volume? Using the Macs OPTION key takes 5 minutes to scan two SCSI controllers to find a startup drive.

Normally I would boot from a small-ish 18GB 15K drive and that would mean configuring to boot from multiple drives in order to be "dual boot."
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After installing 10.1 A3 - resulted in a black screen when I rebooted from CD #1 and tried

install start_shell

Even AFTER wiping the drive in Tiger's Disk Utility; resetting nvram; booting from CD to start over I would still get the black screen. So I want to know why.

I assume something got written to nvram or Open Firmware, (or does a monitor have its own nvram?). The monitor now just flashes the "on" light when I try to enter shell, which never happened before, and still works normal in OS X. Is there a modified or new entry in Open Firmware commands or variables that was modified or added that I need to change?

I'm almost ready to try Alpha 4, only this time with a "backup" 19" CRT that is more forgiving of what resolution and Hz setting it will accept and use.

Just finished downloading four of the five CDs - the first image was too large for a CD and I had to burn a DVD to make it fit. I could only burn up to 700MB and it came in at 707.4MB.

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Resources I found to help:

Install Guide
OpenSUSE PPC Resources
Booting on PowerMac
PPC Partitioning
PPC Installation Issues
Most Annoying Bugs
Power@SUSE
What's New
http://www.opensuse.org/Download