Installing Ubuntu on an XServe

[Todd O'Bryan]

I've been trying unsuccessfully to install Ubuntu on a G4 XServe with
two removable drives for the past two days.

I get as far as it trying to install yaboot and get an error saying that
ofpath doesn't support the driver for pata_pdc2027x. I tried poking
around in the Open Firmware to see if I could figure out what it should
be, but had no luck. I'm a little worried that Linux may think the
drives are SCSI but OF thinks they're SATA--but I'm also not sure what
difference that might make.

Another wrinkle that I should mention is that the version of parted
included with the Ubuntu install CD (I've tried using both alternate and
server versions) seems to have some problems. I could never get it to
set up the drives as a software RAID array and today, after dropping
into the shell and trying to run parted manually, I got a message saying
"You've found a bug in parted" which was promptly followed by a core
dump.

Any advice anyone could give me would be appreciated. I'm a high school
teacher and I'm moving the server to Ubuntu after we started using it in
my lab at school. I do have Ubuntu (and yaboot) running quite nicely on
my PowerBook, so I know it's possible!!!

Thanks,
Todd