newbie install...many problems (burning/booting/more to come

preemi · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 24

Hello. I am very new to gentoo, and to all nix in fact. I have been running freebsd/redhat/openbsd for about a year now, and I think I've come comfortable enough that I want to depend on linux on my powerbook instead of OS X/9.2.2.

WARNING>>I am new, sorry for stupid questions, I've searched the forum and haven't found much. (Oh yea just to note, everything I know I learned on my own, AKA, I'm in high school and don't have any formal education/experience in the computing field).

Problem 1) I downloaded the G4 optimized stage 3 bzip2 tarball and burned it as a data cd using nero on XP. Now, I don't have any idea how to get into the bios on a Mac. I tried burning this file to a cd, then holding C as I restarted, but it wouldn't boot off the cd. In my mind, this is fine because it is not an ISO image so I wouldn't understand how a mac could run off of a .tbzip2 file. Also, I would have thought there to be an install script which would untar the file, but there's just a .tbzip2 file in the 1.4 release folder. So, is there a way to burn it in Nero so that it will boot, or should I just try the .iso image from 1.2 that is not G4 optimized?

I know I only explained one problem, but I need to get it installed before I start running into new problems.

Sorry for lame questions but I really want to get gentoo to work on my mac...mainly because of the ports.

Thanks a lot,
Kevin

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

go here
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/build/1.2/

and download the file
gentoo-ppc-1.2-r1.iso
then you need to burn that AS AN IMAGE onto your cd. Nero doesn't (last I knew understand that iso is an image so you have to override) once you get it burned you should have a bootable system on the cd
will probably just boot straight up when you put the cd in at boot (but I don't know macs)

once you are into the system as a linux system you can use that tarball
never did it but should just be a
tar -xjvf stage3.tbz2 /mnt/gentoo [edit] looks like that is a little off just follow http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-install.xml [edit]
where mnt/gentoo is where you mounted the root partition of your system

also the gentoo install is not meant to have the creature comforts of other installs but just follow the install docs and you should be fine.

goodluck
David

hook · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 1:06 pm Post subject:

well ...if you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask

...that's what these forums are here for ...hopefully you'll like it here

_________________
tea+free software+law=hook

(deep inside i'm still a tux's little helper)

preemi · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 24

i have a question. i booted off th iso image, made partitions, mounted swap and created the root partition. when you have to mount the root partition to /mnt/gentoo, is it okay if you use the -f option? when i tried to mount it to /mnt/gentoo it wouldnt work unless i added the /usr directory and extractd the source there, but then i just tried to mount with the -f option and it appears to work, but is this done correctly?

thanks kevin

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

you mean
-f Causes everything to be done except for the actual system call;
if it's not obvious, this ``fakes'' mounting the file system.
This option is useful in conjunction with the -v flag to deter-
mine what the mount command is trying to do. It can also be used
to add entries for devices that were mounted earlier with the -n
option.

no thats not ok because you havent mounted anything

What errors do you get when you try to mount it? Lets start there

I certainly dont want to discourage you from asking questions i am more than happy to answer them but do you know about the man pages. ie man command-name it would have told you that -f does the above so you would have been able to come right out and say

I can't mount /dev/hda2 (or whatever) on /mnt/gentoo i get the error: _____ but faking the mount works perfectly.

That way we can answer your questions a little faster. Anyways keep working at it gentoo is really worth the time, its the only os i have ever managed to keep on my computer for more than a year :)

preemi · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 24

hmm...sorry about that, for some reason i thought -f was force, not fake. Therefore, I thought I forced it to mount, and it allowed me to continue on the installation, but I wasn't sure if that was an okay thing to do.

Anyways, I've tried installing it twice more (each time I get closer I think) and finally I got the yaboot to work. When I ran the yabootconfig, it said do you want to put bootstrap on /dev/hda2 to load kernel on /dev/hda4, I said yes, but then it says problem occurred, aborting. Did you mean yabootconfig --chroot instead of chroot yabootconfig, yet I did not specify anything with chroot.

Then, it says /usr/local/lib/yaboot/yaboot cannot be found, so I moved the three yaboot files from /usr/lib/yaboo/* to /usr/local/yaboot/. Then I modified yaboot.conf (I think I did it wrong, keep reading) and ran ybin -v and I guess it accepted it. At this point, everything was looking pretty good, and then I rebooted. It failed to open the /vmlinux kernel, so I simply specified hda4,/boot/vmlinux and it starts to boot the kernel. However, I get the following problems, then it reboots(shortened for brevity):
VFS cannot open root device "sda2"
append a "root=" boot option
So now Im thinking I had sda2 instead of hda2 somewhere in the yaboot.conf file (however, I don't know how to get into a rescue mode so I am going to reinstall right now) and I assume the "root=" problem lies within me typing something else wrong in the yaboot.conf file.

So, I am about to retry this again, hopefullyI will get it right.

If there IS a rescue mode, could someone let me know how to get into it so I could just modify the yaboot.conf instead of trying to reinstall the entire system?

And also, I just checked 'man mount' on freebsd and it says about -f:
forces revocation of write access...also forces R/W of an unclean filesystem.
Does this really mean fake, beacuse I honestly have read this and I assumed all that lingo meant force...ignorance is bliss i guess

thanks for the help...Ill get there soon.
Kevin

preemi · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 24

alright...believe it or not, i got it to work and i just logged in for the first time. hmmm....i guess now i need to read more docs on how gentoo's portage system works...then i will pimp out my pb g4.

thanks for all the help....but i guess practice makes perfect....though it took 8 tries, it will be worth it

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

glad to here you got logged in, and that is really wierd and somewhat disturbing that bsd uses -f for force. If you do need a rescue cd you can always use the install cd it is a working bootable system.