|
||
|
Title: The Odyssey of Linux PPC Post by ReeBop on Jan 16th, 2004, 9:31pm Chapter 1 - Installing Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 on a "old world" Mac is a bitch. Chapter 2 - Be prepared to acidentally lose your Mac partitions. Backup everything. more to follow.... |
||
|
Title: Re: The Odyssey of Linux PPC Post by ReeBop on Jan 17th, 2004, 1:07pm Ok, since my mac is considered an "old world" mac (pre iMac stuff), the first step is to setup a program called BootX. On the Yellow Dog site, read about how to set this up as well as the BootX documentation that is copied from your Yellow Dog cd. The one big step missing is how to boot the thing.....they don't give you a clue. Make sure you force the video off, and you select the BOOT kernel to boot the thing. If you choose the regular kernel, IT WILL NOT WORK. Next, I'll describe how I got my 4.3 drive to configure without the help of MacOS9. |
||
|
Title: Re: The Odyssey of Linux PPC Post by ReeBop on Jan 20th, 2004, 11:32am Ok, here's where the backing up of data will save you. After booting the BOOT install kernel in BootX, the install screen came up, but with a problem....it could not partition the drive. In fact, the installer crashed. After some extensive research, I found out that I would need to initally boot and setup the keyboard, and open the bash install screen (Alt + F2, if I remember right) and run the pdisk utility by hand before the installer reached that point. Wow, talking about tricky. My linux was going to the second scsi drive, so I entered pdisk /dev/sdb and away I went. Then, I went back to the the installer terminal (Alt+F1), and the installer finally saw the drive correctly and automagically setup the necessary partition. Now, I was ready for the install after hours of research and frustration. |
||
|
Title: Re: The Odyssey of Linux PPC Post by ReeBop on Jan 22nd, 2004, 1:22pm The actuall installation went smoothly. I selected a "workstation" install and I decided to install my other favorite programs and utilities later. It was about 2.5 gigs or so. After that, I rebooted fully into MacOS 9.1 to initialize the sound card. The big mess is to setup X....the installer didn't know anything really about my mac. I chose "No video" when BootX came up, and then booted into linux. I used the redhat-config-xfree86 tool to set it up, but then, my colors looked terrible. A little more research found my answer.... Stay Tuned... |
||
|
Title: Re: The Odyssey of Linux PPC Post by ReeBop on Jan 23rd, 2004, 4:54pm Ok, my last big problem was getting my graphical desktop with the proper colors. After some Googleing, I found that the default Yellow Dog config set the colors at "16 bit". That is nice if you have a nice video card, but is not nice if you are using the built-in PowerMac 7200 video. It was suggested to use "15 bit" and to hand edit the XF86Config file. Why YellowDog didn't do this is a mystery to me and I didn't find the answer in their user forum....only people asking the same question with no answer. After I made the change, there was KDE looking great and I proceeded to secure my box, write my time updating script in cron.hourly and all my favorite tools like Mozilla, Psi IM, and GKrellm. Sadly, I upgraded the Mozilla to 1.4 and there is no Java plugin for it. Kinda silly that Yellow Dog didn't mention that. I can get Java working with Konqueror though, but that will be another day. |
||
|
1freeworld Groups » Powered by YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.3.2! YaBB © 2000-2003. All Rights Reserved. |