YDL off the cutting edge

[Andrew]

On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 14:59:46 -0500
Rick Thomas <rbthomas55 at pobox.com> wrote:

> Ray,
> 
> It's unlikely you will ever be able to boot YDL on an OldWorld mac 
> *directly* from CD.  You can't do that now with 3.0 or 3.0.1.  It's 
> technically possible to build a bootable Linux CD for OldWorld 
> machines, but there are licensing issues that make it legally 
> difficult.  So I'll venture to predict that you'll never see such a 
> thing from TeraSoft, or most likely any other Linux distributor.
> 
> That said, it's not difficult to get Linux running on OldWorld Mac 
> hardware.  The recommended (by me -- others are of different religions) 
> way is with a small MacOS-9 (or MacOS-8) partition and the "BootX" 
> extension.   Email me if you need instructions on how to do this.
> 
> As far as getting YDL 4.0 running on OldWorld machines:  As I 
> understand it, the issue is that the kernel and initial-ramdisk on the 
> 4.0 CD are missing one or more drivers necessary for OW Macs.  There 
> has been some work by folks on this list to compile a kernel&modules 
> with the necessary stuff, but I'm not sure what degree of success 
> they've had.  Anybody want to comment?
> 
> Rick
> 
> PS: It seems likely that the YDL4.0 installer is unaware of the OW 
> hardware quirks and may have problems with it as well.  I seem to 
> recall that the installer gave the TerraSoft folks fits when they were 
> developing 4.0, so it's a safe bet that it will take a bit of work to 
> get it to play nice on an OW machine.  Again, anybody want to comment 
> on this?
> 
> 
> 
> On Jan 30, 2005, at 5:09 AM, R. Hirschfeld wrote:
> 
> > For anyone from TerraSoft on the list, will security updates and the
> > like be backported to YDL 3.0.1 or has support for that version
> > essentially stopped?
> >
> > I have an Old World machine (Wallstreet PowerBook) and I'm try to
> > decide whether to stick with YDL (which I'd prefer) or switch to
> > another distribution.
> >
> > Alternatively I can hold out until YDL 4.1 (or 4.0.1) is released on
> > CD if it will include a kernel that will run on an Old World machine
> > (my understanding--please correct me if I'm wrong--is that 4.0 does
> > not but that it is relatively easy to include this).  I realize that
> > TerraSoft has dropped official support for Old World machines but I
> > can handle the setup myself if I can at least boot the installer from
> > the CD using the kernel and ramdisk supplied.  Will that be possible
> > with the next release?  Is there a tentative timeframe yet for this?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ray
> 

I don't expect TerraSoft to provide any support for OldWorld ever again :(

Let me do it. There is, indeed, just a few quirks about YD4 on OldWorld
macs. The first one is the 2.6.8 TSS-provided "default" kernel that will not
boot such macs. But its not far as it sit at a MON> prompt, keyboard working...
Eddieb provides a kernel that will boot, install and run YDL4 on OldWorld Macs.
Thus its "made-for" ANS machines, it work anyway. The ramdisk.image.gz found on
YDL4 CD1 is fine for what I can tell off my personal experimentations...
Kernel 2.6.9 from a TSS hero DO WORK with OldWorlds

<http://shiner.info/files/Yellow%20Dog%20Linux%204/kernel/vmlinux-2.6.8-1.ydl.7>

Make sure you install in 'text-mode' (insert 'text' in BootX more kernel arguments)
This will avoid some RAM problems some folks ran into. This time, as opposed to YLD3,
You will need a /boot partition (50MB should be enough as only 16MB is currently
used on mine)
Lastly, you HAVE TO USE the initrd-*.img file AS A RAMDISK IN BOOTX. This mean you'll
have to manually copy the file /boot/initrd-*.img onto the MacOS side of things for
each kernel you wish to use.

Lastly, thus I have been successfull with YDL4 on OW, among many others,  some models may
not go.
Please, visit this thread on yellowdog-board for issues and/or success stories with YDL4
on OW macs.

<http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewtopic.php?t=339>