Fails to boot on PowerMAC3,5 from install media

[Chris H]

Greetings, all
I recently upgraded my wife's Mac, and was looking forward to utilizing
her old one for FreeBSD. However, after nearly 5 days, I have been unable
to so much as boot the install media (CD).
I started with the 9.3-release iso. It would always hang either somewhere
at the keyboard/mouse initialization (USB), or re-polling the DVD drive. I
finally gave up, and tried the 11 CD, but using it, always resulted in a
reboot shortly into the initialization process, so I decided to work my way
from the 9.0-release, through the 10.x-releases. Which all also failed
fairly early in the process. All 10.x ultimately result in an endless
(aprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted
loop. Just for kicks, I burned an 8.0 CD, and placed it into the Mac, and
lo-and-behold I got the install screen. But the drive portion didn't work --
it wasn't possible to delete the old partitions (it said something to the
effect that it (D)elete wasn't an appropriate option). I also attempted to
install OpenBSD, NetBSD. Both with varying degrees of failure.
So, out of complete desperation, I tried Linux.
I went from zero to desktop in under 20 minutes, with Debian Stretch,Jessie,
and Ubuntu-Mate.

WTF?!?!?

I've been on BSD for some 30yrs, and this just seems plain *wrong*.
Doesn't BSD (Darwin) bootstrap OSX? Sorry if this seems a bit "rantish"
but at this point I'm pretty frustrated. :-P

FWIW; HARDWARE
Power MAC G4 (QuickSilver/Digital Audio) Dual CPU @800Mhz (each)
PowerMAC3,5
PowerPC (2.1)
ROM 4.2.5f1

*Any* help bootstrapping FreeBSD on this is *greatly* appreciated!
I'd love to contribute, but if I can't even bootstrap BSD, what am
I to do? :-)

Thanks!

--Chris
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------