I know similar questions have been asked but I could find an answer to my exact question. Especially in anything like laymans terms. So when I try to start my iMac G4 running linux it starts, runs lines of code, flashes black then back to code several times then "Failed to start the X server.... output to diagnose the problem..." When I click yes here is what I get:

"Caught signal 11. Sever aborting.

In the mean time codes like the following appear on the side of the screen :
[ 477.501334] eth1: switching to forced 10bt
[ 497.901209] eth1: switching to forced 100bt

and so on.

What do I do?

It would help if you posted some more info such as what Linux distribution you're using (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian, etc. AFAIK those both have PowerPC ports), your video hardware and drivers, and what Xorg.0.log says (you should be able to find this in /var/log).

I am running Debian. How can I find this in /var/log? I can't do anything with it running those port things. What else do you need to know?

"Port" in the context I've used it in simply means a version of a piece of software that has been designed to run on a certain hardware platform (in your case, the PowerPC architecture, as opposed to the Intel x86 architecture found in most PCs).

Just enter less /var/log/Xorg.0.log at the command line, and that should show you the log file.

A way you can post it here would be to copy the file to some kind of removable medium, and move it over to a computer (or other OS, if you don't have access to another computer) where you can access the internet (I'm assuming from your post icon that you can access the 'net from Mac OS just fine).

Yes I can access the internet just fine. I was able to fix the problem with the lines of code popping up but still having the xserver issue. I will try to get a copy of that and post it really soon.

I am not familiar with how to copy said file to a flash drive though. Can I just take a picture of my screen with my camera?

**Never mind about the camera I didn't realize how long the file was.**

It would help if you posted the whole log here as text. Since you mention you have a USB flash drive, you can try this:

The designation of your USB drive should be either "sda" or "sdb" depending on whether your first hard drive is an IDE or SATA drive. If it's IDE, then it would show up as /dev/hda, and your USB flash drive would probably be /dev/sda. If it's SATA, then it would show up as /dev/sda, and your USB drive would probably show up as /dev/sdb. mount will tell you what devices are mounted where.

It says i have sda sda1 and sda2. Should cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log /dev/sda
copy the file?

**I tried above code, it made my flash drive unformatted.**

You pretty much never want to copy a file directly to a device node.

The files in /dev aren't actually files in the traditional sense, they're interfaces to external devices, such as disk drives, input devices, audio/video devices, etc. that can be read from/written to as if they were files. By copying the file directly to the device node, you've directly overwritten part of the flash drive's directory/file structure, and have probably corrupted it (writing straight to a device node ignores any kind of filesystem structure; this is what mount is for). Is there a backup you could restore it from (as in a disk image file)? Was there anything important on it that can't be recovered from the hard disk?

EDIT: hang on, when you say you tried the above code, did you mean your example of cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log /dev/sda, or my code above?

If it's my code above...I don't see how that would format the flash drive. It should create a directory on the HD (/mnt/usb), mount the USB drive to it, and copy the file to that directory (which is now pointing to the filesystem on the USB device).

It was a brand new flash drive and has been reformatted. I got the top part of the above code that you said to use about mkdir to worjk but after mount /dev/sda /mnt/usb it says mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Most USB flash drives are formatted as FAT IIRC, so you could try mount -t vfat /dev/sda.

mount alone (i.e. with no parameters) will show you what device nodes are mounted to which directories in the filesystem. The one that's mounted as "/" is your root disk. If you have other partitions (as seems to be indicated by your mention of the existence of a /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2), then they'll show up as well, probably mounted under directories like /boot and/or /home.

It is formatted as Mac OS Journaled.

In that case, I would try mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda /mnt/usb.

...another idea springs to mind (apologies if this seems to make the previous idea of transferring via a USB stick rather dumb): are you sure what you're trying to mount isn't your Mac OS hard drive/partition? Unless what you mean is that you've just reformatted the USB stick to Mac OS format (which is apparently called HFS+, according to Apple's website), which I'm guessing is what you meant.

Either way, the above mount command should do the trick if that's the filesystem that the drive (be it the USB stick or the internal Mac OS partition) has been formatted with.

Also, my apologies that this has turned into such a long thing over mounting and devices...it's just that it makes it a lot easier for us to get more specific information when we have a log file to look at to see where the problem could lie.

There is no Mac OS partition. I am trying to run only Linux. The previous Mac partition had file damage. Unable to find HFS+ superblock.

It says the file type does not exist on the drive. Is there some other way we could do this?