8 Dec 2025

Apple iMac G5 — Part 6

So far Arch POWER is the Linux distribution that worked best on the iMac G5 so far.

Adélie Linux

Adélie Linux is a distribution that officially supports the Power architecture. The distribution development does not seem very active, but let’s give it a try.

Choose the installation medium

On the download page, answer the questions to choose the installation medium:

CPU: PPC64
Flavor: Desktop
Environment: KDE

Then download the corresponding ISO image. That’s quite user-friendly so far.

Boot the installation medium — Round 1

Burn the ISO image on a USB stick and boot the iMac from it with… nothing, for once it automatically boots on the USB stick. The configuration I did initially (setenv boot-device ud:,\\:tbxi) in Open Firmware is enough, no need to use a specific command to boot on the USB stick. That’s cool.

While the live CD is booting, I think I saw that it uses OpenRC (nowadays most Linux distributions use systemd) and X.org (as seen with other distributions, Wayland is probably not supported on this CPU architecture).

The live CD uses a graphical user interface, but KWin crashes quite early (it looks like it’s a known problem), so that’s not usable.

Boot the installation medium — Round 2

Same again but this time using the LXQt desktop environment. The ISO is much smaller, 750 MB instead of 2 GB for the KDE one.

So this time, we have a graphical user interface to install Adélie Linux. The installer called “System Installation” is in the menu under the “System Tools” submenu.

The installer asks a few questions:

the keyboard layout;
if we want to load proprietary firmware;
the disk partitioning;
the internet connection;
the timezone;
the computer name;
the software selection;
the bootloader installation;
the root password;
the user accounts.

And then it proceeds with the installation. The whole process took less than 15 minutes. Impressive.

Boot the installed system

And it does not boot… Not impressive. Open Firmware is stuck looking for a bootable media.

Conclusion

For a small distribution, Adélie Linux has made quite a lot of efforts on the installation process to be as smooth as possible. Unfortunately, I was not able to test more than that.

Solving the booting issue may be not too complicated, but at that point I’m a bit tired of all those efforts. It seems that this iMac won’t be able to run a modern operating system to be used as a desktop computer.

I do like the look of that machine and really would like to use it as a desktop computer. Idea for the future:

extract the motherboard from it and try to use it in server mode;
fit a small computer in the iMac G5 case and use it as a desktop computer (if I can manage to interface the LCD panel to it).