Thank you, I partitioned the drive as you said, and Yellow Dog
installed without a hitch. Unfortunately I'm not quite out of the
woods
yet. When I boot from my firewire drive, I enter "l" to load from
Linux and it brings me to a screen where I need enter "mac-boot" to
proceed with booting or "shut-down" to shut down. But from there the
screen freezes. I can't type anything, so i can't make the computer
shut down except by pressing the power button. I tried booting from
my
brother's G4 iMac and it skips the second screen (where my G5 iMac
is
having issues) but then I get a message saying "Kernel Panic, tried
to
stop init!". What's going on?
Thank you for your time.
I'm having trouble creating the partitions for Yellow Dog. I own a
G5
iMac (PowerPC) with 1GB of RAM, and am trying to install Yellow Dog
on
a LaCie 40GB Mobile Hard Drive brand new, no previous OS installed
on
it. The drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (not journaled). When
I
boot from the Yellow Dog install disk, and enter install firewire
at
the "boot" prompt, i get all the way to the manual partitioning
with
Disk Druid. It lets me partition the Apple Bootstrap (although I
notice that it partitions at 8mb, even though I told it to
partition as
1mb. When I try to create the swap partition at 512mb, it gives me
a
"cannot allocate partition error". The same thing happens when I
try to
make the root partition.
Anyone know how to correct this, preferably FREELY? I know I could
use
iPartition to make the partitions for me, but spending $50 on
something
I'll probably use once is not exactly appealing. Do I need to
format
the drive in some other format (such as FAT32), or is there another
way?
Hi Chris:
Generally, before you install YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) you need to
format
the drive onto which YDL will exist.
If only YDL will exist on that drive then before you run the
installer
you need to boot from the Apple System Disk which came with your
computer. In other words before we get to do anything involving
Linux
or YDL we need to format the drive using Apple's Disk Utility which
resides within the System Disk (if you have the DVD form of that
System
Disk which comprises the Hardware Test and everything else for OS X
otherwise you'll have a string of CDs; either way the program to
use
will be Apple's Disk Utility regardless and it should see the
entire
drive you intend to dedicate to YDL. As nothing else but YDL will
be
on that drive all you need to do is select it to create 1 partition
and
select the kind of partition called Free Space. It is important to
note here that although Disk Utility calls it Free Space, in
actually
that is the format structure upon which YDL will use to create ext3
partition from that free space.
After Disk Utility creates what it considers to be Free Space if
the
Drive was mounted, it will disappear from the desktop. OS X will
ask
you to mount the drive, choose instead to ignore that request; in
other
words ignore the drive. After Disk Utility has finished creating
the
Free Partition, and you've closed that application. Then boot from
the
YDL installation disk and tell YDL to format that newly formatted
drive. Be sure that you can recognize which drive you are
formatting
and read the partition maps of which drive you are telling the YDL
installer (anaconda) to turn into a Linux or YDL only disk.
It might be a good idea to review the installation manual before
proceeding further.
If you need to review a manual regarding the instructions just
download
it (for free) from here:
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/support/installation/
I expect that the rest should be smooth sailing from that point.
Good Luck...
Hi Chris:
Well, something is moving along in a positive direction, and that at
least ... is a good thing.
Instead of booting the way you described, why not just press the
option
key just as your computer is booting up? This will bring up a
series
of images representing all the drives the computer sees both OS X
and
Linux (after the YDL installation has successfully completed of
course;
you can recognize it as a Penguin sitting down along the lower right
side of the HD icon). You should wait until all the drives
available
are listed; that is, wait for the cursor to return to normal. On
that
screen there is also the option for you to have the computer
recognize
more newly attached drives (that button looks like a circle pointing
to
itself); this is useful in case you turned on an external drive just
a
wee bit after the computer already was booting up. In that case,
pressing that button forces the computer to review again whatever is
attached to it's ports as an external HD.
Anyway, after the cursor is back to normal in that setting then you
select the drive you want the computer to boot from at that moment
(you
can use the arrow keys, or move the mouse, or move your fingers
along
the trackpad) and then press the return/enter key and you should be
on
your way booting into that OS. The rest takes care of itself.
If you choose the Linux drive, you'll see linux startup and an
option
offering you to enter a selection from the keyboard. My suggestion
is
that you don't enter anything; a script will take over enter the
word
"linux" and continue with the boot process. Then you select which
environment you want: KDE or Gnome.
Good Luck ...
