LinuxPPC Installation
16-Sep-00
Stefan Jeglinski
original R4 pages
R5 aka Q3 aka 1999
- No way no how would the fancy x-installer work. Complete piece of shit if you ask me. From the CD it would run, but every file that was attempted to be installed errored out. When I downloaded the installer pieces from the LinuxPPC web site, and followed the directions in the guide to the letter, it insisted on finding a CD; but putting the CD in caused an error that it was not mountable. Trying to run it entirely from the hard drive according to directions caused an error that no HFS partition could be found (a totally bogus result!). Bottom line: it was not possible to use the fancy x-installer, either from CD or a hard drive!
- The way it worked was to use the Redhat installer:
- Make an HFS partition large enough for the MacOS and the entire Redhat distribution. The Redhat distribution is contained in a folder called Redhat and can be on a partition separate from the MacOS (in the example partition map, the Redhat folder happens to be contained on the volume called linux, the 8th partition of the first ATA drive, hence known as hda8). It includes the directories base, cksums, instimage, maps, RPMS, and the files debug.log, ppc, and redhat.image.gz. The RPMS folder must contain virtually every rpm file included in the LinuxPPC distribution.
- Into the MacOS System Folder of the HFS boot partition, put the file ramdisk.image.gz and the kernel file (for example, LinuxPPC Standard) into a folder called Linux Kernels.
- Install the BootX control panel.
- Launch BootX (reboot required only if BootX extension is not loaded).
- Set command line argument to ramdisk_size=8192 redhat, turn the No Video Driver checkbox on, turn the Use RAM Disk checkbox on, and select the correct kernel file (for example, LinuxPPC Standard) in the kernel menu.
- Start Linux from BootX control panel.
- The Redhat installer launches. The remaining steps are very similar to the LinuxPPC R4 Installation. Hit OK to begin:
- language: English (or whatever)
- keyboard: mac-us-std (or whatever, possibly extended)
- install media: Hard drive
- Redhat Partition: select the partition (/dev/hda8 from the example partition map) containing the Redhat distribution.
- installation path: install
- disk setup: fdisk (it's actually pdisk!)
- partition disk: /dev/hda (device and model # specific to your computer)
-> hit Done if no.
-> hit Edit if yes.
- select Done because the disk has already been partitioned.
- see step five of the R4 Installation if you really still need to partition the disk.
- set mount points: referring to the example partition map, set mount point of device hda12 to / and set mount point of device hda14 to /home.
- active swap space: referring to the example partition map, set swap partition to device hda13.
- the available packages are scanned; if any are missing, you will be alerted. Unless you want to know which ones you may have missed, select Ignore all.
- partitions to format: select hda12 and hda14.
- select components to install - I typically select all but the following packages:
- Console Games
- X Games
- News Server
- Samba Connectivity
- IPX/Netware Connectivity
- Postgres (SQL) Server
- select mouse:
- for standard Mac ADB 1-button, select adbmouse
- for 3-button Mouse Systems MacPoint Pro, select Mouse Systems (serial)
- typically, turn 3-button emulation on
- network config: may be skipped at this point; configuration is identical to that found for the R4 Installation.
- timezones: set hardware lock to GMT and select time zone.
- services: defaults, strongly suggested to turn off sendmail, httpd, and dns
- printer config: skipped (turn on after Linux is running)
- select a good password
- leave auth config at defaults (use shadow and MD5 passwords)
- video config: try to select your monitor, but don't be alarmed if this step fails; Xconfigurator can be run at any time
- installation successful!
- Notes:
- Using a boot kernel in this step other than that suggested by the documentation (for example, LinuxPPC Standard) may cause problems, for example the secondary redhat image file failing to load with an unable to mount device error. OTOH, experience with the documentation shows that it can be more unreliable than anything else, so don't hesitate to try any built kernel you can find.
- If you know the Linux partitions (hda12 and hda14 in this example) have already had ext2 file systems installed (aka formatted), the format step may be skipped.
- After selecting the components to install, you may be informed of unresolved dependencies. In general, you should always select the option to satisfy dependencies. I spent a great deal of time experimenting with this, doing things like leaving certain packages out of the install. I found that you may not be able to resolve critical dependencies (even if the packages left out seem completely irrelevant!), leading to serious install errors and/or a Linux system that doesn't work correctly. Trust me, unless you are an expert, don't pick and choose which rpms to include in the RPMS folder, don't install individual packages, and leave as few unresolved dependencies as possible. For example, I had 11 unresolved dependencies, only two of which (cvs and egcs-c++) had no suggestions. The need for most of the unresolved dependencies was to install tsch, even though mnay people never even use this shell!
- Running out of inodes. If you run out of inodes during the install, you may see errors about no disk space, even though you know you have enough disk space. I found this to be common when I was experimenting with leaving out various packages. Again, I recommend that you include all the rpms in the RPMS folder, and let the installer figure it out.
- For subsequent reboots, your will typically select your preferred kernel instead of the install kernel.
2000
- As far as I can tell, the only difference between LinuxPPC 2000 and 1999 (aka R5 aka Q3) are package upgrades. To change from 1999 to 2000 then does not require extensive rework.
rapierbit