I burned the installer, and ran it on a Pismo G3. I get blankness. I was hoping there would be a textual boot menu at which point I could tell it to do a non-gui installer, but it didn’t seem to work out that way. Might anybody have experience / guidance / recommendations / urls that might help me get MATE going on this venerable machine?
thank you!
What version of Ubuntu MATE?
Sincere apologies. Yes, I’m a lame person for not mentioning more details! 
I am trying to get 15.04 installed. On an old Pismo G3. I go the iso via bittorrent onto a Win7 box, used Win7 to burn to DVD, and then rebooted the Pismo with the Option key down to get into the firmware menu to choose what volume from which to boot. It did show linux on the DVD and i clicked to boot that. Things happened, but the video didn’t show up that I recall, even text, and the DVD sort of ended up thrashing. Given the hardware, I guess the DVD player could have issues. If there were a netinstall image that I could do via CD then I’d swap the DVD drive for the CD one and see if that is any better, but I haven’t seen a text installer for MATE PPC? I was just mainly wondering if anybody else has tried to do a Pismo and if they have a writeup of what they did. I haven’t found that yet, at least for MATE. Thank you.
p.s. for those who appreciate George Carlin, “…and then I crossed the International Date Line.”
Getting Ubuntu MATE installed on PowerPC can require some tinkering. Take a look at the following to see if custom kernel options help with initialising the video.
It might be that your PowerPC model requires a custom kernel or custom initrd. Visit our G+ community, search for PowerPC and you’ll find links to where the PowerPC users discuss and help each other with this stuff.
Lastly, there in a bug in Xorg that ships in 15.04 that causes video corruption on PowerPC. This is not specific to Ubuntu MATE. This was recently fixed in Ubuntu MATE 15.10. Another issue with yaboot was fix after Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Alpha 2 so my advice would be to try a current daily image.
Thanks, you are a fount of knowledge, and kind to share it. Should I manage to get things working, I will make sure to blog & post here too 
You probably have a rage 128 card or something similar, which is a pain because it nearly always requires an xorg.conf file. You probably also don’t have a lot of memory, if it is something like 256MB or less then that is a struggle with the live/desktop iso. If 15.04 is what you want then I would use the netboot/mini iso to install MATE.