retpolanne blog

Your friendly programmer catgirl 🏳️‍⚧️😺

7 February 2024

Gentoo on the iBook G4

by Anne Macedo

Lost everything: using an iBook G4 because I sold my M1 MBA lol.

Getting Gentoo to boot is a little tricky. Preparing a usb boot is okay - just dd the Gentoo ppc image to the usb, no need to do any magic.

To make it boot, I had to put the usb stick on the uppermost usb! If I put it elsewhere, on the boot choice screen, it won’t boot.

Now, I’m seeing the error Invalid memory access and I’m trying to figure out what might be the problem - I then figured out I was using a 64 bit image on a 32 bit computer. :facepalm:

Boot options showed up by holding shift while booting grub, after a few seconds.

tags: linux - gentoo - ibook - ppc