I had an irritating cold last weekend, so I decided to waste it by installing Darwin (the soft underbelly of MacOS X) on the 7300/200 next to my sickbed<g>. It was sort of middling rough getting it installed, and I thought I may as well write up the process. At least as much of the process as I remember!
The first thing was getting a cd image. I went to Apple's Darwin site, but they wanted a registration. I avoid that sort of stuff if possible, and it is. There's a site called www.GNU-Darwin.org that has a cd image with Darwin and a bunch of GNU applications that Apple's cd doesn't have, and no registration required. It's about 600Mb. I've got a couple of drives in the 7300; an 18Gb SCA with a 50pin convertor, and a 700Mb Quantum from a 6100. I've got MacOS 9.1 on the 18Gb, so I decided to try to be safe and install on the 700Mb. The 700 had been formatted with a now old copy of FWB toolkit (even though it has an Apple ROM) and the above web site said that Darwin only really likes the Apple formatting utility- so I used a copy of Silverlining to low-level format the drive, and then used Drive Setup to create a single HFS+ partition. I copied a minimalist 9.1 system on the new disk, because, hey, couldn't hurt. Later I was glad I did. Darwin needs XPostFacto to support the 7300's hardware, so I got it and read the XPostFacto.html file (handy hints!). I put the Darwin cd in the drive and ran XPostFacto. I selected the "Start Mac OS X From" drive to be the cd, which it can't actually start from- but that's the setting it wants. That let me set the "Install Mac OS X To" to the 700Mb drive. I then clicked install! Then, I reset the "Start Mac OS X From" drive to be the 700Mb and clicked Restart! WooHoo! After a few error messages (which I can't seem to remember now- and they seemed so important then...) I got a menu with a few options, including install over an existing installation, and install on an empty disk. Which to choose? Well, I chose the empty disk option. I also chose to do a small install (since it's a small disk). After a while, and possibly some forgotten questions (but not many!) another menu let me reboot. And then, blank screen. Monitor still in power save mode. Option-P-R, and reboot-- screen! WooHoo! And then, after some error messages implying it can't find the disk and/or display, nothing. Luckily, I remembered reading that booting with the "Option" key goes into MacOS 9. I held it, and woot! It booted (off the 18Gb drive, the 700 had been de-blessed!) I re-ran XPostFacto, had it reinstall its extensions, set the OpenFirmware input setting to keyboard and the output setting to the onboard video, and again clicked on Restart. This time it worked! There was a little setup to be done, for the first run. I had to set a password for root (the superuser, super administrator account). Packages were installed. Ironically, no other user was set up (ironic because one of the weird things about Mac OS X from a unix standpoint is that the root user is not set up, just an administrator-- or so I've read). So, I go to the /etc/passwd file, where users are added in most Unices, and there's a message about changes here not being worth the disk space they're scrawled on-- use netinfo. I eventually figured the netinfo database stuff figured out, but it's not important because I decided to do a full install on the larger, faster disk. I reblessed the 9.1 system on the small disk and reran XPostFacto to install on the big disk, and then went through a similar experience to the first time, but this time I chose to install all the happy fun GNU tools in addition to the basic Darwin setup. With this setup, more fun things were installed (including a minimal Gnome desktop-- the base package only had twm, which *is* nice and lightweight (though I remember when I didn't like it because it felt more bloated than fvwm)). Gnome'll run pretty well, and it's really worth the extra resources used. This time, a regular user was also added! So good. A few network questions were asked, and answered. (My delving into netinfo paid off here, since the script assumed some things about the network that are usually true, but not always- and not in my case- so I had to tweak some settings in the database). Now, everything is installed and mostly happy. I have to specify the X Window screen size explicitly in my xinitrc file, or else it gives me 800x600 on a 20" monitor- ick. When it restarted, though, there were a bunch of messages about starting Apache (a web server) and sshd (a remote login server), which freaked me out a bit-- there was a security bug in a library that is used by those programs, and I know the cd I have is older than the patches-- but I look at what's running on the system, and those programs aren't running. sshd is there, but not being run. It looks like a pretty tight ship, security-wise. Well, that's about it. I reblessed the 9.1 system folder on the large drive, after holding down the "option" key to boot off the 9.1 folder on the small disk. I only had to do that after an actual install, not everytime I switch OS's. Wow, that's a long, freaky post. Well, I apologize, but you see, nobody at work was interested! <g> -- Dana [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
