Kanga

I am trying to get Ubuntu 5.04 or Debian 3.1 running on the original PB G3 (aka Kanga aka 3500). The only problem: the screen is blank after the inital reboot after the installation. Nothing at all (Ubuntu) or only an inverted penguin (Debian). The boot process continues only if one copies over the ramdisk image from the /boot folder onto the HFS partition and specifies it as boot argument. Might it be that the root=/dev/hda8 (in my case the root partition is hda8) is somehow not recognized?

I am trying to get Xubuntu 6 installed on my old Powerbook. The problem seems to be the video mode. The installer starts but the screen output is addressed only to the upper half of the monitor and is additionally garbeled although one can still guess what's going on. According to a list on the internet the kernel parameters one should pass using BootX it should read: