Trying to Install YDL on G3 Beige

[Clinton MacDonald]

Ms. Lee:

Lola Lee wrote:
> I'm trying to install Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 on my G3 desktop machine.

Welcome aboard!

> The problem is when I select the local CDROM as the installation method, 
> I get "The Yellow Dog Linux CD was not found in any of your cdrom 
> drives. Please insert the YDL cd and click OK to retry".

Well, that's odd. You know, of course, that an Old World Mac (such as 
yours) is unable to boot directly from the CD-ROM (you probably do know 
that if you read the "Companion to Installation," but it bears repeating).

> Backing up a bit, I had an 160GB hard drive installed, made it the 
> master drive. The original drive is now the slave drive, as is the CD 
> ROM drive. The newer drive is partitioned into 2 parts, the larger part 
> being reserved for YDL. I have OS 9 installed. It is hooked up to the 
> wireless router (this is probably important as a way to solve this 
> problem).

The Mac OS *must* be installed within a single partition within the 
first 8 GB of the boot drive. Is this how you have it set up?

> Following the "A Companion to Installing YDL 3.0", right now I'm on page 
> 4, step 12 for the old world rom systems. While mousing through the 
> screen options, I noticed that in addition to the local cdrom, there's 
> three options - ftp, nfs image, and http.

I am not sure where you see these options -- are you looking at the 
"BootX" application/Control Panel?

According to the "Companion...," you must install a few items by hand in 
your Mac OS 9 System Folder: the BootX App, a folder called "Linux 
Kernels" (with some items inside it), and a file called 
"ramdisk.image.gz." Do you have all those set up *exactly* as described 
in the documentation?

> I would prefer to install off the cd rom, if possible, because
> I found that it took a long time just to create these cds.

You're in luck (sort of)! Yellow Dog Linux can *only* be installed off 
the CD-ROM. I don't know where you found the other options.

> So, what could be the reasons for the installer not recognizing
> the cd rom (I watched the lines of text that scrolled up when I
> went into Linux via BootX and it definitely did read in information
> about the cd drive)? And how to fix this?

Go over again the instructions in the "Companion...." There are some 
steps in there that must be performed exactly as written, 
counterintuitive as they might seem.

Does this answer any of your questions?

Good luck!

Best wishes,
Clint

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