extreme newbie - G4 dual processor, dual boot help


Subject: extreme newbie - G4 dual processor, dual boot help
From: Mike Arnold (ma@snowcamp.org)
Date: Sun Dec 24 2000 - 19:54:22 MST


I have a brandy new 450Mhz dual processor G4 Mac with gigabit ethernet and
an Apple 17 inch Studio Display. YDL 1.2.1

I decided to get another physical disk to run YDL from(IBM DeskStar 60Gig!
... who woulda ever thought that 120Gig on one desktop was even possible:-)
. Around the time I installed the disk I encountered the G4 front panel
on/off problem (which I have not gotten fixed yet .. but it complicated my
installation a bit).

Anyway, it seems the partitioning works, I've gotten yaboot up, through the
Open Firmware boot process, linux starts up, and I can log in as
root. With a 640x480 screen, I can run startx and everything seems to work
(well mostly). This is with novideo specified in my yaboot.conf. I want
to do dual boot.

Problems (so far)

1) eth0 initialization fails on startup, no real diagnostics that I've
noticed ... just [Failed]
2) If I try to run without novideo, the screen goes blank ... and it seems
everything stops
3) If I try resolutions greater than 640x480, startx doesn't find a
matching definition.

So I thought that (1) might be related to the G4 dual processor kernel, so
I downloaded the new kernel. And here is where this newbie could have
used some instructions. So I replaced the vmlinux file with a renamed
vmlinux-smp-2.2.17-20000912 (was this right?). Rebooted, got a message
about 'Finding module dependencies depmod .... failed', eth0 initialization
failed still ... When I get 'localhost login:' it doesn't respond to the
keyboard ... seems hung.

So, I am stuck. I think there may be a 'video=' string for my display, but
I have not been able to find the Open Firmware doc, or anything definitive
on what values I should specify ... I think this could fix the display problem.

Any thoughts? Or am I just too early in the curve?

4)I thought I remembered reading that the mac partition could be mounted in
linux ... is this documented anywhere? How is this done?

and while I'm at it:
5) It seems my /usr partition, defined at 500M, is 70% full with the
standard installation, how do I add more space? I know this is pretty
standard unix admin ... and I haven't investigated much yet.

many thanks in advance for any advice or pointers,
or manuals to (expletive deleted) read,
Mike



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