Hello and thanks in advance for any aid you give me...I'd like to setup debian on my g4 350 mac here but I'm getting a bit lost as
to what files I exactly need to gather and from where. I've encountered a
couple
websites and read a few versions of documents but I'm getting confused as to
what list to follow and what to grab file wise.
I guess my few hours spent pouring over sites and documentation has left
me with little
confidence to know what I need to exactly download and do.
I hate to ask someone to hold my hand through this process but I'm pretty
unsure so any help
as to what and where I need to go to get the ball rolling on this would be
greatly appreciated.thanx,
aaron---------------
Shannon Hooge
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Daemen College
Academic Computing Department
icq: 19144626
716-839-8290
Attached is my record of my installation on a PowerMac 4400/200. Perhaps it'll be of assistance (and, perhaps not).
-- Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED]How I installed Debian GNU/Linux on my PowerMacintosh 4400 Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED] Description of System --------------------- Power Macintosh 4400/200 = 603e = "old world PCI system" 80 MB RAM 2GB hard drive attached to an ethernet LAN Basic steps: 1) Back up system 2) Repartition drive 3) Restore Mac on first partition 4) Install Debian on other partition(s) 1) Backing up the system. 1a. Several methods available; easiest for me was to copy to network drive 1b. Booted off a system CD with network capability (by pressing "C" during the boot sequence with the CD inserted. 1c. Mounted a network drive with sufficient space on it to hold contents of current drive 1d. Copied everything from current drive to temporary folder on network drive 2) Partition the drive. 2a. Still booted from the CD, run Drive Setup (in the Utilities folder on my CD). 2b. Select the hard drive and click on "Initialize". 2c. Click on "Custom Setup". 2d. Shrink the existing partition to 1024 MB. 2e. Click on "OK". 2f. Click on "Initialize". (This is it - everything on your previous drive is now gone.) 3) Restore your system. 3a. Still booted from the CD and connected to the network drive, attempted to copy all the contents from the network drive back to the local hard drive's newly created, smaller, partition. 3b. Problem: the hard drive wouldn't open, and it appeared to be non-functional. Also, the CD-booted system started acting a bit flakey, so I restarted the Mac. Didn't have to hold down the "c" key to boot off the CD, as there was no other system available anymore. 3c. After the restart, I was asked if I wanted to initialize my new 1GB partition; I named the hard drive "Mac HD" and clicked on "Initialize". 3d. I remounted my network drive and then copied all my data back to the local hard drive. 3e. I rebooted the system, letting it boot off the hard drive, to make sure everything looks just like it did before, only with a smaller hard drive (1 GB instead of the original 2GB). Everything looks fine, which means I now have a 1GB unformatted partition on which to install Debian GNU/Linux. 4) Install Debian on other partition(s). 4a. Get the necessary files. 4a1. I created a new folder on the Macintosh hard drive named "Debian". Do not put this folder on the Desktop or in a path that has a space in the name, like "My Applications". For some reason, doing so caused a problem for me when it was time to install the drivers.tgz file. 4a2. Within the newly created "Debian" folder, I created a folder named "images-1.44". 4a3. Using Netscape, I went to ftp://ftp.debian.org, followed the tree to "Debian/dists/potato/main/disks-powerpc/cur- rent/powermac. 4a4. I then downloaded the following files into the "Debian" folder - BootX_1.2.2.sit, bootargs, bootvars1.3b.sit.hqx, drivers.tgz, install.txt, linux, ramdisk.image.gz, sysmap.gz 4a5. I then went into the images-1.44 directory and downloaded the following files into the the "Debian/images-1.44" folder - boot-floppy-hfs.img, driver-1.bin, rescue.bin, root.bin 4a6. I have no idea which of these files are necessary, so I got 'em all. 4b. Prepare BootX. 4b1. After closing Netscape, I double-clicked on the downloaded file "BootX_1.2.2.sit" and the Macintosh was smart enough to expand this file for me, creating a new folder named "BootX 1.2.2" within the "Debian" folder. 4b2. I opened the newly-created "BootX 1.2.2" folder by double-clicking on it. 4b3. I moved the "linux" file in the "Debian" folder into the "Debian/BootX 1.2.2/Linux Kernels" folder. 4b4. I double-clicked on "BootX App", which brought up the "Choose your OS" window. I went into the "Options" button and clicked on the "Use specified RAM Disk", pointing it to "Debian/ramdisk.image.gz", and clicked on "Open", then "OK". 4c. Back at the "Choose your OS" window, I chose "Linux". This will shut down the Mac (save any open work you've been doing) and start Linux, using an image on a ramdisk. This ramdisk image will automatically start the Debian install routine. 4d. The rest of the install process is fairly intuitive, and similar enough to the Debian for Intel installation that other documents should be of value to you. Nonetheless, I'll hit some of the high-points below. 4e. Choose the appropriate keyboard when prompted. 4f. At the Partition a Hard Disk prompt, you have some decisions to make. 4f1. If you don't have at least a working understanding of disk partitioning, stop. Learn something about disk partitioning. Basically, partitioning defines "logical" drives. For example, a physical drive might have 20GB; you could define a 10GB partition and two 5GB ones, or any combination thereof (well, within limits). In DOS/Windows, these partitions would then be labeled drives C:, D:, and E: (most likely). In Macintosh, they'd be labeled whatever you labeled them, perhaps "Mac HD" and "Second Drive" and "Third Drive". At any rate, you're dividing the physical drive into smaller chunks called partitions. After defining the partitions, the partitions have to be formatted for whatever operating system will be using them. Earlier, in step 2, my 2GB drive was partitioned into two 1GB partitions. The first 1GB partition I then formatted for Macintosh and restored my system to. The second I left blank for the time being. Now it's time to do something with it. 4f2. Since my drive is an IDE drive (as opposed to SCSI, etc), it's labeled /dev/hda (the first drive on the IDE chain. /dev/hdb would be the second drive, /dev/sdc would be the third drive on the SCSI chain, etc). 4f3. The partitioning tool used by Debian at this point appears to be "fdisk"; functional, but not particularly pretty. I much prefer "cfdisk", even over the Redhat-style "disk druid"; the Macintosh "Initialize" tool used in step 2 was pretty nifty, but I still prefer "cfdisk". Perhaps it'll be available in the next release of Debian for PowerMac. 4f4. I pressed "p" to print the current partition information to the screen. It looks like there are a bunch of partitions that I don't know anything about. I thought I had divided the Mac drive into two 1GB partitions; I assume the /dev/hda1 through /dev/hda4 partitions are "house-keeping" partitions used by Macintosh. Not knowing about these extra partitions, I'm going to leave them alone. The one I'm interested in is the /dev/hda6 partition, which is 1GB in size and marked as "Free space". So here is where I'm going to create my partitions. 4f5. On Intel machines, IDE drives can support a maximum of 4 primary partitions. Macintosh obviously has worked around this limitation. 4f6. Linux needs a minimum of two partitions: a root (/) partition and a swap partition. THe swap partition should probably be 128MB or smaller. If you have a small hard drive, I'd make it smaller, perhaps twice the amount of physical RAM you have in the Mac. The swap partition is roughly analogous to the "Virtual Memory" setting on your Macintosh; it is basically a designated section of hard drive space that is used as slow "simulated" RAM. 4f7. I prefer to have six partitions: 4f7a. / (root) of about 100MB 4f7b. /var of about 50 - 200 MB 4f7c. /usr of most of the hard drive (for applications) 4f7d. /tmp of about 50 -200 MB 4f7e. /home (about 200MB per user of the system, for preference files, data files, user-installed programs, etc) 4f7f. swap 4f7g. sometimes I add an /opt or a /usr/local as a separate partition. These two locations are used by various distributions for installation of non-distro software. (/opt has been adopted by some of the commercial people, but I tend to think /usr/local is more proper, so I would make /opt a symlink (if you don't know, don't worry about it right now) to /usr/local/opt.) 4f8. So I press "c" to create a new partition. 4f8a. When it asks for the "First block", I enter the number that is in the "base" column corresponding to the "Free space" row; in my case, that's 2097856. 4f8b. When it asks for the "Length in blocks", I specify "60M" for 60MB. 4f8c. When it asks for the "Name of partition", I specify "Root". 4f9. In a similar fashion I create the other partitions. 4f9a. / = 60MB 4f9b. /usr = 640MB 4f9c. /var = 50MB 4f9d. /tmp = 50MB 4f9e. /home = 100MB 4f9f. Swap. For the size, I entered the value in the length column of the remaining "Free space" row; otherwise, if I had entered "128M" I would have had 96K or so of wasted space left over just dangling uselessly at the end of the hard drive. 4f10. I press "w" to write the partition definitions to disk, and then "q" to quit. Sometimes the system suggests that you reboot; if it does, I would. 4g. Initialize and Activate a Swap Partition. 4h. Initialize all the partitions (one at a time). I wouldn't bother retaining 2.0 kernel compatibility. 4i. Install Operating System Kernel and Modules. 4ia. Install from the harddisk. 4ib. Take the rest of the defaults. 4j. Configure Device Driver Modules. 4j1. block - You probably won't need any of these. 4j2. fs - If you expect to use DOS/Windows floppies, you'll probably want the fat, msdos, and vfat file systems. If you're on a LAN that has Windows servers, you'll probably also want smbfs. 4j3. misc - You'll probably want appletalk, printer if you have one, and soundcore. 4j4. net - If you have a dial-up connection, you'll probably want ppp. 4j5. Since I have no SCSI devices, I installed no SCSI modules. 4k. Configure Network. 4l. Install the Base System. If you're on a LAN and you only downloaded the files mentioned earlier, choose to install from the "network". Otherwise, you'll need to reboot into the Macintosh side and get the "base2_2.tgz" file from the ftp site you downloaded the other files from. 4m. Configure the Base System. 4n. Don't make Linux bootable directly from the hard disk if you have a multi-boot setup; BootX will take care of this. 4o. Reboot the system. Start Linux from BootX (using /dev/hda6 in my case instead of the ramdisk). Enjoy. 4p. This did not install X, Netscape, etc. etc. etc. You only have a bare minimal setup. You can now use "dselect" to add the fun stuff.
