installing gentoo without editing the MBR

ishkabob · n00b Joined: 22 Jun 2005 Posts: 14

Hi everyone. Here's the deal. I have a Sun Ultra 10 workstation at work running solaris 8. I cant stand it! Im not allowed to install another operating system, just software on the home drive.
Ive tried various methods of building a nice livecd, but non are dumbed down enough for a user like me. The only thing I havent tried yet is building a livecd with catalyst. But I would have to build it on my x86 machine, and that would complicate things beyond my realm of knowledge.

My next thought is this: I use the universal livecd to boot into a basic gentoo, chroot into a folder thats under my home directory, and use portage to install some software namely gdm, X.org, gnome, and firefox, which is all i need at work. I know it wouldnt be fast, but at least it would work. And considering how crappy the cd drive is on this sparc machine, it probably wouldnt be too bad.

Then, whenever i wanted to run gentoo on the sun, i could just use the livecd to boot, and run gnome manually from the command line. This way, I wouldn't edit the the Master Boot Record, which I would probably get fired for.

Is this possible? Pointers and tips are greatly appreciated.

RayDude

ishkabob · n00b Joined: 22 Jun 2005 Posts: 14

I just had a better idea. I could do a full gento install on the 4 gigs of free space that is on the drive (its on the scratch), and then use the livecd to start SILO, and boot the installed kernel from there. Is this possible?

RayDude · Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2005 10:59 pm Post subject: Re: an even better idea?

gust4voz · Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2005 1:10 pm Post subject:

You could just boot from the livecd with a changed root= option pointing to the relevant partition on the disk.
The LiveCD supports UFS read/write, but i don't know how sturdy UFS write is for that kind of use. YMMV.
Anyway you couldn't just root to a solaris ufs partition since there's the solaris binaries and stuff, in that case you could try to boot from the livecd, mount the ufs partition rw and then chroot and use (remember you have to mount proc and basically run the initscripts yourself this way).
_________________
Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

ishkabob · n00b Joined: 22 Jun 2005 Posts: 14

yeah, thats basically what I'm working on right now. I'm going to make a directory on scratch, chroot to it, and install gentoo. Then I can use the livecd to boot the kernel image thats on that disc. However, I've mounted the ufs filesystem, and I tried to create a folder, but it says that its read only. When i type mount, it lists the mount point as being (rw) so I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Any tips?

RayDude · Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 12:30 am Post subject: