Hello All, I spent my last weekend installing Linux/GNU OS onto my PowerMac 8600 250MHz/385MB. I'm brilliant (reads: I don't read all of the documentation, especially when I should, so feel free to correct me) and slogged through an attempt of installing OpenSuSE 10 PPC without success. The stock kernel would not boot (I was using BootX). It displayed some information and then the screen went blank. (In case you're wondering I chose OpenSuSE, I use it as my Linux desktop at work)
Searching on the internet, I saw the nice distro list at http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php. This list does not include SuSE in the list of vendors that support OldWorld machines. Open SuSE's wiki on the other hand has a page (http://en.opensuse.org/Booting_on_PowerMac_%28OldWorld%29) covering an OldWorld install. After looking at the candidates on the PPC+oldworld list I chose Debian PPC. I downloaded the netinstall disk from GA Tech (http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/debian/) because GA Tech rules. Of course I can't find the ISOs anymore. I guess I downloaded them from somewhere else. Anyways, I'm rambling. This post is for anyone else who is doing the same thing and for others to correct my stupidty. :) Steps: 1. I removed all non-stock equipment, Sonnet Tempo ATA 100 PCI (with disks) and Yamaha CD Burner. -- This avoided problems with hardware, but I had to deal with getting those device to work later (not hard but not easy if you don't know your way around Linux). Knowing now that these devices will work right off the bat, I should have installed with them in. The Sonnet Tempo ATA 100 card uses pdc202xx kernel modules based on the Promise chipset (google search and you will find more information) 2. Clean installed OS 9.1 onto the machine, partitioning the 2GB drive into 3 partitions. 512 MB HFS (not extended) for the OS, 512 MB as AU/X Swap and 1.5GB as AU/X Root. You can make the MOS9 partition smaller, but that's your choice. Since I was adding two more IDE disks with 30GB and 40GB space was not my concern. 3. Downloaded and installed BootX. I read the BootX instructions which only covered uptil the initrd part. I pulled the kernel (/install/powerpc/vmlinux) and initrd (/install/powerpc/initrd.gz) from the install CD's boot directory /install/powerpc/ (which was kinda odd since I'm use to looking in the /isolinux directory used in X86 installs). 4. BootX options. See the initrd option was easy since it was in the instructions. The rest of those options are confusing. With the default 8600 settings you want to use "Force video settings" option (no idea what that "Force SCSI" does. Check the box for "No video driver" on the main screen. Don't add anything to the kernel's command line. (I have tried the same with the OpenSuSE 10.1 PPC install disks but they don't work) Even with these settings, it take a while for the screen to come back after the initial boot messages (which won't mean anything to most people - anyone know what I need to get the serial output off this machine?). You will be presented with a wonderful language selection screen. 5. Go though the standard installation stuff. Now in all seriousness, I forget what the partitioning screens look like. But since I already had partitions for swap and root (aka '/') I didn't have to do anything else except choose to format them. The installer forced me to use EXT2 as my root filesystem (I forgot why). 6. Now, I finished the installation of software packages and the installer went straight to using "quik" an OldWorld boot loader that gets you past BootX. I skipped that since I could not find anyone using it on my hardware. Moving out of that screen I came to the installer's blue main menu. I tried using the 'option' key - F2 ('alt' on a winDOwS keyboard) to switch to another virtual terminal like some other install guides mentioned, but that didn't work. I could however use the installer's main menu option to open a terminal shell. I needed to open the terminal shell to copy the newly install kernel and initrd onto the MacOS9 disk's "Linux Kernels" folder. Now here is where my problems started. Every single guide tells you to mount /dev/sdaX (where X is your MacOS9 partition, in my case it was /dev/sda6) and happily copy them over. The following is the happy method that people claimed works (remember to replace and XYZ): mount -t hfs /dev/sdaX /mnt cp /target/boot/vmlinux-XYZ /mnt/System\ Folder/Linux\ Kernels/ cp /target/boot/initrd-XYZ /mnt/System\ Folder/Linux\ Kernels/ My reality was that /dev/ did NOT contain the necessary devices files (sda6 or sda8), neither could the running kernel read HFS (this command shows this "grep hfs /proc/modules"). The running kernel could see /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda8 ("cat /proc/partitions"). "df -h" on the other hand gave me a nasty device path /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/lun0/part8 (yikes!). I tried mounting the partition using that long path, but ran into the problem of unsupported filesystem. So I tried booting with BootX without the initrd using "root=/dev/sda8" as a boot option, but that didn't work. Well, what to do? I was stumped initially, because I didn't have filesystem support in my kernel to mount the partition, nor did the standard device names work and I was missing needed utilities. Turns out, that I had just installed everything I needed! The Debian installer mounts the installation partition as "/target". The running kernel, 2.6.8 is the same as the installed kernel which meant I could simply "insmod /target/lib/modules/2.6.8-powerpc/kernel/fs/hfs/hfs.ko" to get HFS support. :) To get access to all of my installed binaries I gave myself a chrooted bash shell "chroot /target /target/bin/bash". After giving myself the chrooted shell, I could use "mount -t hfs /dev/sda6 /mnt" to mount the MacOS9 partition! This worked because the chrooted shell had /dev/sda6 mapped to the same path as /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/lun0/part6. I copied over the initrd and vmlinux files and rebooted. 7. I tried BootX without an initrd again, but that didn't work. I needed the initrd and unchecked all the other options. The machine is now successfully installed. :) Any thoughts or questions? (clarifications?) Here's hoping this helps someone. :) thanks, TuskenTower -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
