DONE: Beige G3 desktop w/ Gentoo on separate harddisk

plate · Last edited by plate on Wed Oct 30, 2002 6:21 am; edited 2 times in total

This is certainly not my first Gentoo installation, but the first on a Mac, and I'm treading on unfamiliar grounds here, kindly bear with me, please...

The thing is, I was donated my first Macintosh yesterday: an antique beige G3/266 desktop sporting the original 4 GB HDD and 96 MB of memory, and it's running Mac OS 9.1 international English edition. The other thing is, I have a few old IDE drives sitting in a cupboard waiting to be put to good use again. Nothing bigger than 8 GB, but still. In an Intel-PC I'd simply shove it in a bay, connect and fire it up, but this Mac's HDD is screwed to the bottom of the case leaving no space for a second one in that particular location, and it's connected to the bus with a cable that doesn't allow for a slave drive. Can I simply change that cable? The only space where I could put additional drives is in the bays next to the FDD/CD (no idea how to fix one there, though, do I need a tray or something?). In terms of connection I'd then have to chain it to the CD drive, something my x86 experience says is generally a Bad Move.

This gentleman suggests to do it nonetheless, so maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. Unless somebody now jumps up and yells "Don't do that, you idiot", I'll give it a try. My most important question at this point: Yaboot lives in the bootstrap partition, but if I'm installing Gentoo on a separate disk rather than the same as Mac OS 9, will a bootstrap partition on a slave drive be queried for booting at all?

Oh, while we're at it, would anyone want to recommend what I shall or shan't do in terms of upgrades to CPU and memory? Any chance I can eventually dualboot OS X on this thing without melting a hole in the motherboard?

Hey, I own a Mac now! Hadn't completely sunken in, that thought. Cool, I always wanted one...

EDIT:Updated system specs

dingo · n00b Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Posts: 58

yaboot is funny, alot different than lilo. to put it into x86 boot concepts which your familiar with you have a boot loader that loads up at hda1 or whatever always and then when you select linux it loads the next boot loader on that partition/hd and then from there you select linux (or a specific linux kernel), if you pick mac osx your in mac osx

when i turn on my powerbook i hit l, im in my linux menu, i hit enter, and thats it.

yaboot is pretty easy to configure, too -- its actually alot like lilo.

plate · Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2002 6:01 am Post subject:

Thanks. Hope I'll ever get that far.

Right now I'm having all kinds of trouble with the simple operation of adding a HDD to the CD-ROM bus Gerk mentioned... If I put another EIDE drive on the CD-ROM cable as suggested the original disk isn't recognised as the boot medium anymore, I suppose. All I get is a little floppy symbol with a question mark in the middle of the screen at bootup.

What's the trick to get this drive recognised? Or is it only picked up by the Gentoo installer, not by Mac OS?

dingo · n00b Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Posts: 58

the mac startup can be... irritating... graphics are nice, but when it comes to error reporting it can be a bit of a headache to figure out. I would assume thats mac's equivalent to a PC's "no system disk found." did you try booting a mac osx cd and seeing if that could find your hard drive? -- if you have ext2 partitions already made it might crumple mac osx when it looks at it -- I dont have mac osx installed, but i decided to install it again (for the sole purpose of downloading pics from my digi cam, beleive it or not ^_^) and it crashes when it tries to read my partitions. I use ReiserFS (though I regret it, now)

Anyway what i was getting to is mac OSX needs to be on first, might as well try to pop that in and re-install if you can. Swap stuff around and see what happens is all I can recommend, or stick to one hd and one cd-rom drive ;/ but since you ARE using gentoo -- anything more than 8gb is more than enough, multimedia/storage could probobly be done over NFS.

My only other recommendation is finding one of those underground "I figured it out by hex editing" papers -- the mac "bios" has a lot of funny ass key commands you can do to get to some really screwed up stuff -- I think i read somewhere you can even get yourself dropped to a prompt on most of them. I stay away from this because it looks like a headache but it might point you into the right direction or give you an idea of the internals.

plate · Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2002 6:34 am Post subject:

Been getting worse a lot, thank you for asking.

The first drive I tried appears to be dead, but the current IBM beast has 6.4 GB proven to work, and I've even managed to boot back into MacOS with both HD drives connected to the same dual IDE cable! Alas, only once, and that was after a restart with all extensions switched off. The Apple System Profiler then listed it as the second drive on IDE ATA0, with vendor ID and size and everything, but as I said, only this once... I've had panicky restarts ever since, even though I only booted with extensions turned off. I'll ask the former owner for a system CD and try to take it from there. No OS X, just 9.1, BTW, I don't think I could run OS X before significantly enhancing the current specs, do you?

I'm really grateful for your trying to keep up with my tribulations.

Unless you've got yet another idea how to get both drives picked up and Mac OS booted from the legacy volume, I guess I'll leave you all in peace and sod off to a pure Mac forum somewhere to get the electronics fixed before attempting an OS install again...

rac · Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2002 6:55 am Post subject:

That gentleman you quoted earlier is a much more reliable source than I am, so I hesitate to contradict. The site is refusing me now, but http://www.xlr8yourmac.com has proven to be a very useful resource for me. From it I learned that the IDE on my Blue&White G3 is basically made of tinfoil and razor blades, and any attempt to either (a) put two drives on it at the same time, or (b) put any Ultra ATA disk on it is doomed to horrible failure.

The only way that I ever got that machine to be stable once I started playing around replacing the drives that shipped with the machine was to drop in a PCI IDE controller and put the hard disk(s) on that. If you have a PCI slot free I highly recommend this option.
_________________
For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

plate · Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2002 7:56 am Post subject:

You do have a way with words. Couldn't possibly have been less encouraging...

That site you mention (very much down at the time of writing, indeed) had actually been responsible for keeping up my hopes, they do describe a successful installation of a second IDE drive in a B&W G3 [1] without too much of a hassle, so I deducted it just might work in a beige model, too. I've already managed to break a few fingernails and two connectors on the original IDE cables trying, but once I get this mess cleaned up I'd love to know why Apple has these obscure hardware issues. I'll give the CD-ROM cable idea one last shot, then I'm off shopping for either second hand SCSI drives or a PCI IDE controller...

In the meantime, I'm having no ends of fun with configuring netatalk, but I'll branch that one off to the network forum.

[1] Let not going "Huh?" at the mention of a blue & white mini tower serve as proof that I am learning fast. Last week I would have thought "what the hell does he want with a monochrome screen?", today I'm just nodding in full compassion...

rac · Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2002 8:44 am Post subject:

plate · Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2002 9:18 am Post subject:

Remembering what a

dingo · n00b Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Posts: 58

* cough*

Actualy _using_ a scsi card, a 4x cd-r, a 240mb hd equipped with a scsi terminator makes me feel even older, and I'm only 19!!

about the tray -- duct tape, need i say more?

plate · Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2002 5:59 pm Post subject:

A few more days into this entirely new and exciting experience have passed. Allow me to report that I've advanced by a few significant steps, but continue to fail installing Gentoo in the most frightfully embarrassing ways imaginable.

Let me elaborate: The beige G3's IDE channel now hosts the Twin Disk Show, possibly due to lucky circumstances (which we shall call, for lack of a better word, ROM revision C). So, I now have the original Seagate 4 GB HDD as Master, an equally elderly citizen by IBM with mindboggling 6 GB as Slave, and guess what, they both work in OS 9.1 without so much as a complaint, let alone corruption or worse. And they're actually sitting on the same bus, not split between a single drive on one cable and the other drive chained to the CD-ROM. However, I've lost sound altogether (including the boot chime) to a borked attempt at upgrading to Mac OS 9.2.1. This really hurts my pride, but should not concern you.

This, however, should: I've managed to install BootX (no Yaboot on this hardware generation) and can now comfortably choose which OS to boot into, except that booting into the CD doesn't do me much good yet: my Gentoo installation will not go forward as planned unless I figure out wtf is wrong with my keyboard!

Shift key doesn't shift anything, ctrl-c doesn't stop my ping - ever - and even the enter key does some funny business with lots of [[[ and Cs and the likes. Whacky, loco, totally so. May I gently ask you how to prevent this? Any secret messages I have to whisper to BootX?

rac · Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2002 2:10 am Post subject:

If you have support for raw ADB keycodes turned on in your kernel configuration, that may be causing the keyboard to be unfriendly.
_________________
For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

plate · Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2002 2:31 am Post subject:

It's not my kernel configuration! I'm still booting from the 1.2 PPC CD. I've been looking around since yesterday, by the way, and I've found the "keyboard_sends_linux_keycodes=1" boot option other people suggested for yaboot, and I did try it out in BootX, but that didn't help a bit.

Interesting, too: I get a "bus error" restart window and a complete freeze whenever I try to boot into Mac OS immediately after booting Linux. alt-cmd-p-r at startup fixes it all the time, everything is back in working order on the Mac OS side of things, but I can't simply switch back, always have to clean the PRAM first.

And sound stays gone no matter what I do...

plate · Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 8:35 am Post subject:

Another week, another chapter in the OldWorld Gentoo saga begs to be written. Just tell me when you get bored, I'll try to lower my voice then. :wink:

So, I've managed to get Gentoo installed after all, mainly because I decided not to worry about sound for the time being, and discovered by accident that the standard US english keymap sent the right scancodes, it's only the German keymap (this is a German beige G3) that appears to be broken. I've also discovered by accident that I don't need the CD anymore once BootX is installed! Neat. So I went about the installation as planned, initialised disk #2 with mac-fdisk and created a Linux-only partition table there, wgot meself a stage3 tarball and unpacked that, emerged the PPC kernel sources and made sure those dreadful ADB things are unchecked, compiled it with all the features I sensed were appropriate, copied vmlinux to /boot, unmounted and rebooted.

Hm. [insert sound of headscratching here]

How do I get back into my freshly minted custom kernel on disk #2 when BootX is sitting on disk #1, configurable as a brick, and insists on booting the kernel copied over from the installation CD to the system folder on said disk #1 instead?

I'd appreciate any idea on how to tell BootX to look for vmlinux on the second (unfortunately not mounted) disk or, failing that, a comment on whether it is safe to mount an Apple partition from within Linux (so I could simply copy the kernel over to disk #1). Or not. Or what. Please? :roll:

rac · Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 9:05 am Post subject:

You can mount HFS partitions in Linux, and reading and writing seems to work fine. HFS+ is a different story, and is better left alone for the time being. What I do is make a little HFS partition to transfer files back and forth between MacOS and Linux.
_________________
For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

plate · Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2002 6:18 am Post subject:

I do like to clean up after me, especially with threads that received an exceptional amount of help and hospitality. The beige G3 is very much kicking ass now, its second IDE disk spinning merrily under the new regime, but with a tiny 100 MB slice set aside that I can mount -t hfs without any problems whatosever... Ringo (yet another Japanese hostname, this one simply being the word for apple) now obeys to a vmlinux copied over from the shared HFS partition to the System Folder in Mac OS 9.1, and to additional BootX kernel options of 'rw root=/dev/hdb8'. It is currently busy emerging Fluxbox and all its frightening dependencies, X'n'all, and given its 96 MB RAM I suppose I'll be posting from it by this time tomorrow at the earliest...

Thanks again for all the help, gentlemen, I'll be back with more questions!

Yarrick · Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2002 4:31 pm Post subject:

some time ago i tried the swedish keymap on the ppc install cd, and it was also broken.