Hi!
From what I can see here, you did everything right (a couple of
false starts, but that happens to all of us!) I don't know why <cmd>-
F2 didn't get you a screen with a shell -- it's never failed like
that for me. But all's well that ends well, and you found a work-
around by dropping to a shell from the main menu.
The "chroot /target" trick is really the best (and only reasonable)
way to get access to a fully functional shell from which to do things
like copy the kernel and initrd to where BootX can find them. I
don't think it's in the documentation. It probably should be.
Incidentally, you can do "modprobe hfsplus" from inside the chroot'ed
shell to install HFS support. I believe that the 2.6 kernel modules
support both hfsplus and hfs. For what it's worth, you could have
made your MacOS-9 partition hfsplus if you'd wanted to.
Which netinst did you use? Here's how to find out:
Put the netinst CD in your drive and let the system mount it. (If it
doesn't do it automatically, as root, do "mount -v /dev/cdrom /media/
cdrom") Then cd into /media/cdrom and search for a file called
"Release". (I use "find", but YMMV) It's a text file and its contents
will tell you the date the .iso you burned the CD from was created
and some other useful information. There will probably be a few
"Release" files. The one closest to the root (least number of
intermediate directories) is most likely to be the one you're looking
for.
The output of "uname -a" is also helpful.
The reason I'm interested is because I'm having trouble getting the
"beta2" netinst (or anything later) to install on a beige G3, and I'd
like to swap war stories with you and see if I can get it working.
Thanks!
Rick
On Jun 18, 2006, at 12:22 AM, TuskenTower wrote:
> 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 debian-powerpc-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
> listmaster@lists.debian.org
>