Linux on a mac.
 

I picked up two apple G3 233mhz computers the other day and was going to install redhat 9 on them but its not booting from the CD. I really don't want to format the drive until I know its going to boot from the drive after the format so I thought I'd ask how exactly I should go about this...

Well first of all you have to find a linux distro made for Power PC if that's what they are. Yellowdog is the only one that comes to mind but there's sevral out there.

Google is your friend :D

Gentoo makes a PPC version as well. They have a 'Live CD' that you can try to use, but it sucked on my TiBook.

YellowDog seems to be the standard though. Don't forget about NetBSD as well, if you want to go really hardcore.

i am not positive but i think debian, and possibly mandrake make ppc distros as well.. (mandrake would probably have steeper sys req. ) go to linuxiso.org, filter by architecture..

Mandrake does have a PPC version.

I wouldn't suggest using Gentoo's PPC version unless you're an experienced Linux User.

As others have said, Yellow Dog seems to be the standard for Linux on Macs.

Im gonna install yellow dog myself sometime this weekend. It is based off of redhat but has a really nice installer. Gentoo, Mandrake, SUSE are the other versions that come to mind for PPC. There used to be a distro called Linux PPC but that has since gone belly up. If you find it, it will support you machine.