Here's the specs on this project:
Mac G5 Tower, Dual PowerPC 2.7 GHz, 4.5 GB RAM, original 250 GB HD (vintage late 2005). Purchase price was $100 + shipping. Not bad, all things considered. The case was in good shape with very little signs of wear and just a bit of cleaning up to do inside to chase out the 10 years of dust bunnies. Since extra SATA II hard drives are so inexpensive on eBay, went with a second drive for installing the new OS.
After much consideration, decided to proceed with installing the latest stable release of Debian "Jessie" (see previous post of the distributions in the running). Downloaded the ISO, burned to a DVD-R and read through the installation guide on PPC Luddite for some tips.
First item to note, the resulting DVD was not a "Live" disc like what's popular now. Booting from the DVD went right to business going through the steps for installation. Since this was a blank hard drive, selected the options to use the entire partition. Another option was which display manager to use (opted for kdm), and selected the Debian default, KDE and MATE desktops, just to have some variety. Other choices was lightdm for the display manager and GNOME, Xfce and LXDE for desktops - plenty to read up on and consider at the Debian Desktop HowTo page.
Second note, you'll be prompted to set the root password and then create an user account. Remember those passwords! The user account does not automatically belong to the "sudo" group, so that's one of your first tasks after the installation. Read up on that here.
The results? A pretty sweet, massively powerful and elegant system! Seems to be some issues with the sound over the built-in speaker that needs additional research. More comments to come soon!
