PPC 8500/150

[Clinton MacDonald]

Guy:

On Wednesday, September 17, 2003, at 05:35  PM, Guy McArthur wrote:
> Yes, you *can* boot Linux from a floppy on an OldWorld PowerPC without 
> needing MacOS.

I stand corrected!

> [...]
> Then you'd write that image onto a Mac-formatted floppy. I use 
> NTrawrite which is available on sourceforge, but there are plenty of 
> other ways. Now you'll boot straight into Linux. Their installer uses 
> it, so you can wipe out all your MacOS partitions during the install 
> and have a pure Linux system (which is what I did).
>
> Now, unfortunately Debian is pretty user-unfriendly. Does anyone know 
> how I could boot the YellowDog installer from the floppy image? Do you 
> need a second disk (ramdisk image), like the Debian install does? Or 
> can you do it simply by changing the kernel arguments, e.g. 
> 'root=/dev/scd0'?

The Yellow Dog installer uses a vmlinux Boot file 
("vmlinux-2.4.20-8dBOOT") that weighs in at 3.1 MB, and the RAM Disk is 
another 924 kB compressed (the full size is over 8 MB -- I happen to 
have the YDL Install disks in front of me). I think the Debian method 
(which boots up into a partial Linux, then makes you compile everything 
else, if I recall) might let you get away with a floppy-sized 
installer, but Yellow Dog is just too large. Perhaps if someone got rid 
of the GUI install code, Yellow Dog might be small enough (having 
written that, I have no idea what that kind of project would entail, 
nor if it could be done).

However, that would be really cool!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT 
net>