PowerPC installation experience
Package: install-reports
This (attempted) install was performed on my spiffy new PowerBook G4, using
the daily built CD netboot image from 20040522. This was done using the
"install" mode, as opposed to "expert".
I picked en_AU as my language.
The next choice, keyboard layout, defaulted to European, which I thought was
a bit unusual. I picked American English instead.
DHCP failed, because I was unplugged (wanted to use wireless, too bad it
seems, must send a nastigram to Broadcom), so I manually configured the
onboard (but didn't plug in).
I switched from VT1 to VT2 to quickly inspect the current partition table,
and on switching back to VT2, the background changed from blue to red.
# Note to self, try to reproduce partition rename hang problem
When partitioning, the partman main menu offered configuring LVM as an
option, however making a partition an LVM phyiscal volume was not, so I
couldn't progress very far with using LVM. I made a bunch of plain ordinary
partitions.
I was next confronted with a message saying that no NewWorld boot partition
was found. I had made an 850K partition of this type with partman. Switching
to VT2 to look with mac-fdisk reported the size of the partition as only
830K and as of type "Apple_Bootstrap". I would have figured this was what
yaboot was after? I opted not to go back and frig with the partitioning any
further, as it was the default option.
The base system installation proceeded.
Setting up exim took an absolutely inordinate amount of time due to the fact
that DNS was not available. I thought a fake start-stop-daemon was used
during the install? This delay caused the progress bar to sit at 70% for
quite some time, making it look as if the install had hung. VT3 showed
exim4-daemon-light sitting at "Starting MTA: " for ages.
Configuring yaboot was a failure, it displayed a message saying that no hard
disks had been found with an "Apple_Bootstrap" partition. Aha, apparently
the name of the partition is the whole problem. I called it nwboot for want
of something.
Reran the partition disks step, renamed the name of the bootstrap partition
to "bootstrap" (that's all I did, honest), and told it to write the changes.
Again, I was confronted with the "No NewWorld boot partition was found"
message (verified with mac-fdisk that the partition was now indeed called
"bootstrap" - it was).
The yaboot install step was retried, and again failed. I started examining
the yaboot udeb's postinst. I can't grok the mostrosity of a sed call right
now (a bit pressed for time) but the output of a parted -s
/dev/discs/disc0/disc is:
(Manually transposed, so not 100% anatomically accurate with the output)
Disk geometry for /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 0.000-76319.085
megabytes
Disk label type: mac
Minor Start End Filesystem Name Flags
1 0.000 0.031 Apple
3 0.031 0.841 bootstrap boot
2 128.031 40960.031 hfs+ Apple_HFS_Untitled_2
4 40960.031 41448.312 ext3 root root
5 41448.313 41936.594 linux-swap swap swap
6 41936.595 43843.943 ext3 usr
7 43843.944 45751.292 ext3 home
8 45751.293 47658.642 ext3 var
9 47658.642 48612.316 ext3 tmp
At this point I aborted the installation, as I'd procrastinated enough and
had to do some work on an assignment.
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