My minimal install CD hangs upon boot

[superrusso]

Hi! I'm so thankful this forum is here.

I'm trying to boot my iBook G4 to the Gentoo minimal installer CD, and it just hangs at 'Freeing unused kernel memory: 280K'. The caps lock key still toggles, but otherwise the CD-Rom stops spinning and after about 5 or 8 minutes the machine just turns off. I have tried burning media on multiple machines with the same results. And this machine does run FreeBSD and OpenBSD, so it seems unlikely to be a hardware issue.

Could anybody point me in the right direction? All of the PPC installation guides just seem to indicate it just boots up.

Thanks!

[Jaglover]

Welcome to Gentoo!

Here is a list of distros which boot on your hardware. You can use any of them to install Gentoo, all you need is working shell. Then I suggest firing up SSH if it is not already running and logging in over SSH, then you can copy and paste from Gentoo Handbook to the terminal window instead of typing in everything.
_________________
My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[superrusso]

Thanks for the reply! I guess I had not considered installing Gentoo from another distro. I am currently giving this a try. Where would I log in to cut and paste directly from the handbook? W/ Links I assume?

Thank you for the link, however, the chip in the iBook G4 is a ppc, not ppc64, which limits the options for distros considerably. Of the ones listed on distrowatch, I can't find an ISO for a version of Ubuntu for PPC, Ubuntu server doesn't include a fully capable live environment, and Ubuntu Mate is 1.6 gigs. Although I've read you can boot this thing up via OpenFirmware from USB, I've yet to successfully do so.

I'm downloading and burning finnix for PPC right now, which curiously doesn't show up on distrowatch. I'll update my success here if anybody is interested in an iBook G4 in the future.

[Jaglover]

superrusso,

I do not want to discourage you, but now I recall I had a G4 iMac once, it was barely able to run OSX, slowly. With Gentoo there is a great deal of compiling, with a G4 it will take time, days possibly. There are ways to use faster computers as helpers, but this is not newcomer friendly.
_________________
My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[superrusso]

Thank you, Jaglover. I do repair work professionally, thus I'm thankful for you realistically mitigating my expectations.

Luckily, this is really an educational venture. To be honest, I tried to compile Gentoo about 15 years ago and failed. I'm determined not to this time, but the additional challenge of PPC should be interesting. I'm not a total newcomer at this point, but I don't think I'd be able to cross-compile quite yet. I may try this in the future if I get this thing going and want to recompile the kernel.

And I'm prepared for this to take a few days. So far, the installation from Fennix has gone perfectly according to the PPC installation manual, with one exception, I couldn't format the Apple Bootstrap partition HFS+ because fennix doesn't include anything to make an HFS plus volume. It does, however, include mac-fdisk, so otherwise it's pretty ideal for this it turns out. The easy workaround was to skip the part of the manual that calls for mounting the bootstrap to /boot, but after chroot:

[Jaglover]

superrusso,

I do not know how much RAM PPC needs to build from source, but on PC hardware 512 MB won't get you far. And even if you get it all installed opening one single bloated webpage can eat up more RAM than you have now.
_________________
My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[schwarzygesetzlos]

[canardo]

Hi,

I've the same problem than superrusso, on my Powerbook G4 17" with 2GB RAM and 256GB hard drive (fully dedicated to gentoo).
NB : the dvd drive is dead

Using the Minimal installation CD install-powerpc-minimal-20191020T103002Z.iso, I copied it with 'dd' on a usb drive and boot on it.

In grub menu, I choose ppc32
- first try without changing anything
- second try, I type 'e' to edit the boot command, and added 'nol3 video=ofonly' after /boot/ppc32
then ctrl+x to boot

NB : in doc, I noticed
nol3 Disables level 3 cache on some PowerBooks (needed for at least the 17")
and I have the 17"


With both boot settings, it starts loading things, then after a while, got stuck at
Freeing unused kernel memory

And then nothing.

Thanks a lot for your help


ps : I'm totally aware this machine is very old and that compiling might take days.
I'm in no hurry, and I mainly plan, if it works, to use it as an image viewer, and as a remote client for console tasks. A 17" screen is great for both.

[thekingofravens]

So I thought I would describe what I was able to do. I didn't document this sadly, so there may be a missing bit or two.

1. I found an old debian netinst image from the archive, and booted it. (using rescue32 kernel in the case of my g4 mac mini)

2. Dropped down into a shell.

3. Formatted the disk with parted and usual tools (which were available).

4. This shell has the busybox version of tar, which isn't smart. So I had to decompress the tarball using xz on another machine. Then copied it onto that machine.
Copying was easier said than done. The debian image I found did not support normal bios parition schemes (that really surprised me), so I had to host it on my local network, then use wget to download it.
I used simpleHTTPserver to achieve this.

5. I extracted the decompressed tarball.

6. busybox tar does not preserve extended attributes correctly. Therefore I had to chroot into the system, then use the stage3 gentoo version of tar to extract the stage3 installation over itself correctly.
(for the record, truly impressed linux lets me do this, its hard to do something like that in windows)

7. Then, exit the chroot and go to the part of the handbook where you got instructions about installing the tarball. Should be smooth sailing from there. Don't forget to follow its instructions about /dev/shm since this is non-gentoo media.