Linux on a G5 - Followup

You might wonder how it went with the Linux install on my G5. Please read the previous post on this if you are one of my new readers!


It turned out that the Debian installer still couldn't figure out where to install itself, even when the free space ready for Linux was first on the disk. There is certainly something strange with the partition scheme from Apple. As a last resort I went to gentoo. What you can't do with gentoo, I guess you can't do at all. To make the story short, gentoo works as a charm. During my tests with the other distributions, I figured out how to create partitions and mount them using mac-fdisk, mkfs and mount directly. The problem was that even when I mounted partitions, the installer couldn't find them. And if I got beyond that point, I still wasn't abel to install the bootloader properly. With gentoo, everything is manual and up to me, so it was much more easy to perform the install.

The only problem I really had was with yaboot configuration. The yabootconfig script that should have created a yaboot.conf file was nonfunctional with my setup, so I had to write the config manually, based on some examples I found online. That wasn't that hard, but it took me some time to figure out the ofpath id's I needed to put in there, as well as which partition number the Tiger actually should boot from. It turned out that I should not specify the partition where the Tiger lives, but the one just infront of it.

So - end of the story is that I now have a working Tiger and a working gentoo, though it will still take some time to get all the software I need on gentoo. That's why I don't like gentoo that much. The power of the gentoo install, coupled with the power of apt-get/dpkg, that's really what I want. But I guess I stick with gentoo for now - it will certainly give me a lean, mean machine!

A short note on the Shuttle SN25P case is also appropriate here. I can tweak the ubuntu really to what I want. I got NIS and automount working, I have sound and DVD burning working, and most of the packages I want. Actually, I just think about it as Debian, and it works quite fine. Guess I can live with that!

Take care!