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Qwerti
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Joined: 26 Mar 2012
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 4:57 am    Post subject: How to install from OS 9 Reply with quote

Umm... hi! I'm going to install Gentoo on a 366 MHz clamshell iBook G3 that has 192 MB RAM and 8/10 GB of hard drive space. I have experience with the command line, but it has OS 9.2.2 instead of OS X, so I can't use the command-line. The CD-drive does not work, so I can't install OS X on it and I'd have to put Gentoo on a flash drive. I have access to other computers with OS X (PPC) that I could burn the flash drive on, but I'm not sure if the files would be compatible. And how would the process of burning it on to a flash drive be different from burning it onto a CD. I would dual boot it with the original OS, by the way. Any help? Thanks!
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boerKrelis
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 11:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If I were you I'd get a YellowDog live environment running (from flash drive, maybe over firewire, check their docs) and install Gentoo from that environment.
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 12:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think you will get better help here. Unfortunately, I know nothing about the PPC architecture.

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on PPC.
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Qwerti
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 7:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh, for the minimal install, how should I do LiveUSB, and with which Gentoo download? My iBook has Open Firmware, by the way. Sorry if I'm asking for too much, I've never installed Linux, only used the command-line.

boerKrelis wrote:
If I were you I'd get a YellowDog live environment running (from flash drive, maybe over firewire, check their docs) and install Gentoo from that environment.
Thanks, but YellowDog doesn't have G3 support.
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, since no one is answering I'll give a try.

Take all I say with a grain of salt, since, as I already warned you, I have zero experience with the ppc architecture.

In regular pc's and almost every other machine, we'd do this, to "burn" the iso file into the flash drive, be warned that this will totally kill the filesystem in that drive, and any traces of the information living inside that flash drive will be lost:

Code:
dd if=inputfile.iso of=/dev/sdf


Change sdf by whatever your flash drive is. Note I am using the whole drive, and not a partition inside of it.

Being that done, assumed that your machine is able to boot from usb, and assuming that you used the right iso for your architecture, you should be able to boot from that flash drive. That is, in the pc world at least. If no one else can give you a better hint, at least now you have got something to try out. :D
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Jaglover
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

May I recommend you rethink it a little bit.

It certainly is possible to install Gentoo on a G3 ... but with your hard drive and 192 MiB of RAM I'd put portage on NFS and I'd use distcc in pump mode. Meaning there has to be a more powerful box on your network to offer distcc and NFS.
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Qwerti
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 5:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jaglover wrote:
May I recommend you rethink it a little bit.

It certainly is possible to install Gentoo on a G3 ... but with your hard drive and 192 MiB of RAM I'd put portage on NFS and I'd use distcc in pump mode. Meaning there has to be a more powerful box on your network to offer distcc and NFS.


Wait... what's NFS and what's distcc? I think I'm looking into a RAM upgrade of 512 MB sometime in the future.
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Jaglover
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 5:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You wrote you have access to OS X boxes on your LAN, set up one of them as a NFS server. Why? Because portage will consume some space and you are tight on HDD space. I just did du -h on my portage and it is over 10 GiB (after eclean distfiles).
Why distcc. Because even 512 MiB of RAM is still low for compiling, You have to disable -pipe and cannot do parallel make. With 366 MHz CPU it will take ages.
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Qwerti
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 9:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jaglover wrote:
You wrote you have access to OS X boxes on your LAN, set up one of them as a NFS server. Why? Because portage will consume some space and you are tight on HDD space. I just did du -h on my portage and it is over 10 GiB (after eclean distfiles).
Why distcc. Because even 512 MiB of RAM is still low for compiling, You have to disable -pipe and cannot do parallel make. With 366 MHz CPU it will take ages.


Yeah, I think that my computer won't do so well until upgrades. I tried MintPPC on it, but whenever I boot it from Open Firmware, it keeps on giving this message:

MAC-PARTS: specified partition is not valid can't OPEN: /pci@20000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/@0:6,\\tbxi
ok

or:

method <load> not found; ihandle=ffbc8500 phandle=ff85ff60 load-size=0 adler32=1

Is there a Linux distro that doesn't have as many heavy requirements?
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Jaglover
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 9:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, Gentoo is the distro you want to be as light as possible. Only you have to build it for your G3 in another box, because 192 MiB, 366 MHz is not going to cut it. It involves cross-compiling and a few other complications.
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Etal
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Has compilation become that much more intensive?

About 5 years ago, I managed to install Gentoo on an iMac with similar specs (a translucent CRT-looking one), maybe it had a bit more RAM. I've even managed to install KDE 3.5 on it, and it worked at a decent speed. I even compiled OpenOffice 1.x on it - took about 25 hours :)

So I'd say, give it a try. Of course you shouldn't even think of compiling Firefox or Chromium - people are having trouble with them now, with modern machines. But I'm sure if you proceed carefully (watching dependencies), you could get a functional Xfce desktop.
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Daytona
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PostPosted: Thu May 24, 2012 1:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Several times I've been in a similar situation, and I've removed the hard drive and attached it to a USB adapter, and did all of the setup up on a PC. This requires that the PC (or, more genericly, the "other machine") be capable of compiling for the correct (target) architecture, in this case PPC. Once you have a basic system running, then as others have suggested run distcc to offload the compilation of everything else to more powerful boxes.

I've also done this for old PCs where I was having more difficulty getting them to boot from CD.

It's not a terribly trivial task, but does work.
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