Subject: Mac Newbie yaboot question
From: Steve Cockwell (stevec@canux.com)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 19:40:47 MDT
Hi folks.
I was recently asked by a customer of mine why I don't carry any PPC
Linux products on my site, and I didn't really have a good answer for
him. Running Linux under PPC seems like a good idea and being an old
Amiga rat, I was definately interested.
With that in mind, I picked up my mother's iMac from the repair shop on
Friday. I purchased one of the original iMacs when they came out for my
mother because I didn't want to be on the phone with her every day of
the week walking her through yet another Windows problem. As it turned
out, my first experience with a Mac since my early days with Corel
turned out to be less than stellar. When the iMac's display started to
shimmer and shake and occasionally blank out I was second guessing my
decision. When the USB stuff started to lock up randomly (even after
the original patch was made to MacOS) I broke down and sent the thing
back.
I left it in the shop for almost a year :-) and gave my mother a laptop
to run in the meantime. When I picked it up on Friday I found out that
they had replaced just about everything on it. The motherboard was new,
the video board was new (I suppose this would be the high-voltage board,
not the display adapter), and the hard drive had been formatted and
pre-installed with MacOS 9. It worked flawlessly.
I decided that before I gave it back to her, I was going to put an OS on
it that I could stand. So I did a little research and settled on Yellow
Dog Linux. I downloaded the ISO, fried up a CDR, got the PDF install
guide and set in to do the install. I couldn't tell for certain from
the instructions if it was okay to toast all of the Mac partitions on
the drive, but it was my intention to relieve the Mac from it's native
OS - completely. So I did.
For the last few hours I've been trying to figure out what it is about
the iMac that I don't know, or about Yellow Dog that I didn't understand
- but I can't boot YDL to save my life. I've partitioned the drive with
a swap (100Meg) and a root (the rest of the 4Gig drive). I've booted
the cd and ran through the install - no problems.
As per the instructions, I booted the Mac into it's firmware and spent a
lot of time playing around with it's settings trying to convince it to
boot the image YDL left on the root partition. No dice.
So you will all have to forgive me for being really stupid. I know a
*lot* about Linux, but almost nothing about Macs. I can read. I've
searched the archives and read the install guide. Either I'm trying to
do something that's impossible, or I'm missing something important. I
can't shake the feeling that thousands of others must have installed YDL
on an iMac without the MacOS.
Yes, I caught the references to installing a partition on the Mac with
the MacOS install CD, but without the actual OS. However, I assumed
(possibly incorrectly) that this was a requirement for machines that did
not have new(ish) firmware.
Would some kind soul steer me back on course? I really would like to do
this exclusively with YDL, but I could be convinced to break down and
try to find the original MacOS 8 CDs that came with the box if I had to.
Thanks,
.src
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Mon Sep 25 2000 - 19:41:43 MDT