Xubuntu on G3 iBook
I have succeeded 
.
I will give a description of what worked, not the million things that didn't (I don't even wanna say some of the things I tried....)
This will get a live cd to boot when your mac cannot do it. You must have an expendable partition for this.
First, you need to have yaboot. Don't have it installed? Here's what you do:
Put your mac into target mode (firewire) by booting it and holding the "T" button. Using a firewire cable, connect it to another computer (in my case, my Ubuntu desktop). You need to create an HFS (not HFS+) So that openfirmware can boot yaboot. I used GParted to do this. Gparted needs the hfsutils package (found in synaptic) to do this operation. I had some trouble partitioning it because it kept whining about overlapping partitions. So, I just put some space in between the surrounding partitions and unchecked "round to cylinders" to make it partition right. Now, you need to just drag and drop yaboot and yaboot.conf into that partition. You will need to get those files from the LiveCD you are trying to boot. For Karmic, it is located in the "Install" folder
If you do not have permissions to drag and drop, you need to use 'sudo cp' command to do so. Here is what I needed to do:
sudo cp yaboot yaboot.conf /media/HFSPartition
Also, vmlinux and initrd are needed. Those are found in the /casper/powerpc folder. Just copy them to the partition along with yaboot.
You need to find out which partition of the drive the HFS partition is. For me, it was the 4th partition. Remember it!
With those two files in the HFS partition, you can now unmount the mac and restart it. Now you need to boot into Open Firmware by holding Command+Option+O+F at startup. When you are presented with a prompt, type in:
boot hd:x,yaboot
where x is that partition that you had to remember (so mine was hd:4).
This will boot up yaboot and present another prompt. You need to insert the LiveCD into the CD tray, now (I just used a paperclip to force eject it). When it's in there, all you need to type in is:
live
If it whines about an unknown or corrupt file system, you need to edit the yaboot.conf file. I had to do a search and replace on all /casper/powerpc to nothing. So any file paths pointing to things on the /casper/powerpc folder were instead pointing to the root folder, where you dragged and dropped the files
Another problem I encountered was authentication failure because my open firmware's date was set to around 1950. In order for my livecd to boot properly, I had to reset the time. See the link here to do this in Open Firmware:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...60814075952448
I will now mark this as solved, thank everyone for all their help through this journey, and give Open Firmware, EFI, and other ridiculous booters that have stupid easter eggs like pong but still require you to jump through hoops for basic things the middle finger. I'll stick with my BIOS, thank-you-very-much.
Cheers!
References:
https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/install...#boot-newworld
https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/install...files-newworld