[gentoo-ppc-user] Install issue

[gentoo-ppc-user] Install issue

[Qv6]

Folks,

I am trying to install Gentoo on a Power Computing PowerBase 200. I have  
livecd1 and livecd2, and BootX installed. 

When I run BootX, it starts up alright, but drops me into an ash shell with a 
root prompt. Beyond that point, nothing works. The box for sure does not boot 
from livecd1 regardless of the key combinations that I use.

The install doc on gentoo.org has not helped much. Any help from this group 
will be appreciated.

Qv6



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Re: [gentoo-ppc-user] Install issue

[Ben Ricker]

On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 21:06, Qv6 wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> I am trying to install Gentoo on a Power Computing PowerBase 200. I have  
> livecd1 and livecd2, and BootX installed. 
> 
> When I run BootX, it starts up alright, but drops me into an ash shell with a 
> root prompt. Beyond that point, nothing works. The box for sure does not boot 
> from livecd1 regardless of the key combinations that I use.

Hate to say it, but RTFM, as in read the manual. There is an install
guide that will start off right after you get that root prompt. See  
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-install.xml for complete isntall
instructions. I have used this a number of times.

Since you have an "old world" Mac, you will NEVER boot off the Linux
partition. What you do is to trigger the boot of the Linux partition
through BootX, even after you get the linux system completely setup.

> 
> The install doc on gentoo.org has not helped much. Any help from this group 
> will be appreciated.

That is because you are not reading it thoroughly. You have to go
through a number of steps to get s gentoo system running. There are
basically three ways to do it: stage1, stage2, and stage3. Since Gentoo
is a system that can be compiled from scratch (stage1), the install
process can be a very long one. Therefore, they provide precompiled
versions of a lot of software (stage2 and stage3 installs, depending on
the level of compiling you want to do).

If all of these concepts are greek, you might want to switch to
something like Yellow Dog, which is a much simpler, but MUCH less
customized and optimized Linux distribution. 

Good luck. It may seem complex, but you can get a very fast system going
if you start from stage1. For me, with an Old World Mac with a 500mhz
G4, completion of a stage one desktop install took 2 days of compiling.

Ben Ricker


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Re: [gentoo-ppc-user] Install issue

[Pieter Van den Abeele]

Installing gentoo on an oldworld machine is slightly different from
installing/booting it on a newworld machine.

On an oldworld machine, you have to use bootX to boot. The most difficult
part about it is that if you want to boot the livecd, you'll have to not
only select the kernel from the cd, but also pass the correct arguments
(which are otherwise passed by the yaboot boot loader which is used for
newworld)

Your have to tell your bootloader (in this case bootx) to use the kernel
in the /boot directory on the livecd. You'll also have to tell the
booloader, it needs to use the initrd that comes with the cd, and last and
most important thing you need to tell the bootloader which file it needs
to execute in the initrd (which is a small ext2 filesystem containing some
kernel modules and a script to load the live environment).

What the livecd does is:

1. the bootloader loads the kernel
2. the kernel loads the initrd into ram
3. the kernel detects hardware, and is supposed to load drivers on the
initrd
4. the kernel starts the init process (the main process). If you're
booting using yaboot (newworld boot loader), yaboot is preset to start a
file called /linuxrc as init. If you're using another boot loader, you'll
have to instruct the bootloader to pass init=/linuxrc as extra argument.
5. the linuxrc file loads some modules (a driver that is able to mount
loop a compressed filesystem), creates some directories, mounts the live
environment (the live.gcloop file on the cd) and starts init (the regular
init.d stuff) inside the mounted live environment.

>From reading your mail I think what happened is the following:

the bootloader loaded the kernel and the initrd, but the live environment
failed to load. (this could be because init=/linuxrc was not passed to the
kernel) or the /linuxrc file did not run successfully (ran out of memory,
could not mount the cdrom...). The initrd is actually a 'busybox'
environment (= a very small linux environment). It features some very
basic commands. If you're dropped into this busybox environment (you don't
need to type a login there, you're already logged in.), what you can do is
the following:

manually execute the /linuxrc file, and see where it hangs (don't worry,
if it crashes , it doesn't take down your harddisk or something). If it
loads correctly, you forgot to pass init=/linuxrc . If it doesn't load,
the following could have happened:

you ran out of memory (if you have less than 16 memory, the module for
uncompressing the live environment could be really slow, or run out of
memory.) this is quite unlikely. More likely is that your cdrom is very
slow: the linuxrc script mounts your cdrom, then waits 5 seconds and looks
for the live.gcloop file on the cdrom. If your cdrom needs more than 5
seconds to spin up, that is what is causing your problem (next livecds
will have an option that allows you to set the timeout by passing an
extra argument to the kernel). The most likely thing is that the linuxrc
script couldn't mount your cdrom because the driver (probably scsi) isn't
loaded (either my fault (I forgot to include it?), or upstream (the kernel
developers still need to test or develop a driver for your cdrom). This is
part of the reasons why oldworld is not yet fully supported; most of the
time it works, but you'll need to fine tune settings.

I must admit that the gcloop module (used to uncompress the live
environment) used on the cd was described to me several times as a royal
pain for ppc users with exotic machines. Reason is that kernel drivers
need to be build against the kernel. If you for some reason want to
replace the kernel on the livecd, that is only possible if you also
rebuild the gcloop module against the new kernel and put it on the initrd.
The reason I chose to use this compression module is because it allows to
create live environments that are uncompressed 2 gigabyte in size, but
compressed only 600M. This allows for putting
gcc,java,openoffice,kde,gnome,koffice etc all on the same cd.

The ppc livecd scripts still support building livecd with uncompressed
live environment, removing the need for a gcloop module, but tripling the
size of the live environment.

Pieter

















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