Re: Re: Oldworld Mac Support

On Sun, 26 Dec 2004 19:48:06 -0600, Jim Ricken <[email protected]> wrote:
>  Chris L. Mason wrote:
>  
>> I also have it working on an oldword G3 All-in-one (233/4gig/64megs)
>> booting from a small OS 8.6 paritition with BootX. While a bit slow, it
>> works great as a backup system for me as well. I even got firefox running
>> (although I don't run anything else when using it!) Chris    

> Maybe you can
> help me out on this
>      I have oldworld 8600 upgraded with a G4/400mhz proc,497mgs ram,and 4
> Hd's installed.
>  1 is a 4gig scsi and the others are 40gb ide,15gb ide,and a 10gb ide.
>  I was thinking about putting gentoo on one of my drives, probably the 40gb,
> now I need to go get the software at the gentoo website and burn it to a
> cd,but what kind of software do I need,I will be using bootx and probably
> Mac OS 9.0, unless you suggest something else.
>  Jim
>

Hi Jim,

I think OS 9.0 should be fine.  The main problem was getting the gentoo livecd
to boot (since it doesn't support booting directly).  Download bootx,
and then copy
the kernel and initrd images you need from the kernel to the bootx
directory, and
setup them up in the bootx config.  You may need to manually add boot options to
specify the root being on the cdrom device (I can't remember exactly)
and you might
need to also include an option about cramfs (my memory is hazy here.)

Anyway, then boot linux from bootx and if it works properly everything
should startup
okay and you'll get a regular bootup sequence onto the livecd.  Then
you can just go
through the manual install procedure as usual.  After doing the
install and compiling
the kernel, you need to copy this (make sure you have hfs+ support) to your OS 9
drive, to use with bootx.  Then reboot into OS 9, update the confirm
for bootx, and
hopefully you'll now get a boot menu lets you successfully choose
between linux and
macos.

Sorry if some of this is a bit vague, I did this a few months ago and
don't remember the
details (and I'm away on holidays now, so I can't actually check the
old system.)

Let me know if you have any specific questions, and I can try to help.


Chris

(p.s.  I actually had to go through an extra step, which might be
important to anyone
with a single drive.  I had OS 8.6 only on the whole 4 gigs.  So, I
setup an OS X system
with a shared drive, copied all of 8.6 (OS + files), reformatted the
drive, reinstalled OS 8.6,
remounted the old shared drive, moved all the "new" 8.6 stuff to trash
and move all the
copied stuff back to the root drive.  Then run a disk check from
something like Norton,
and it should boot and be exactly the same as before, but with less
disk space.  :)

--
[email protected] mailing list