[ydl-gen] Problem with yaboot/YDL 4.0.1

[Derick Centeno]

Ok.

Frankly, my familiarity with Kickstart ends with understanding that it 
is for producing files which execute graphical logon scripts or allow 
graphical logon scripting.  This means you are doing something 
completely different than most people.  Probably, I'm sure for good 
reason, however kickstart will not address the fundamental issue of 
formatting the the hard drive in the manner previously described.

If the scripts are written such that they do this for you or attempt 
to, that could be a problem as no script or macro should be running 
around formatting anything without the correct procedural steps.  You 
have to just forego do this macro or script and do each procedure 
manually -- at least then, you'll control exactly each procedure at 
each step.
Of course, the other way is to write your own scripts, but before you 
consider that make sure you do know each manual step and command 
necessary to proceed successfully to the next procedure.  It will be a 
lot faster for you to see what is needed, test the process and document 
each step and procedure you engage upon until you develop a successful 
workflow.  Then you can write a script to emulate all that.  At least 
that's how I would write such a script.

The problem will remain Apple's Disk Utility of course; because only it 
can reformat the hard drive from Apple's proprietary format to what it 
calls Free Space.  No matter how you cut it or what you do, if that is 
drive is not reformatted such that the entire drive is structured by 
Apple's Disk Utility as Untitled for the name of the partition and 
formatted as Free Space which Linux can then see; you will continue to 
have problems in this area.  By the way, you do know that this can only 
be done by using the install system disk which came with the mac and 
invoke Disk Utility from within that system disk.

Kickstart however, is a part of Linux anyway, it can't help with this.

Suggestion:  Let's suppose you did everything right the first time.  
Then there should be no discrepancies between your setup and other 
Linux or YDL or Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution as to how each 
partition appears to parted or fdisk or pdisk.  Make a comparison with 
what you posted here as your drive's geometry and just see what others 
share regarding their systems.  I posted to this list an output of 
mine.

When everything is done right you can see clearly where the mount 
points are and which is what.  The only difference you would have as 
your intention is not to use OS X will be that there should be no hfs+ 
or hfs other than the Apple Bootstrap partition (which is explained in 
the YDL manual I recommended).  After you collect this information from 
others , you'll see pretty quickly the truth of what I told you 
earlier; your setup is nonstandard.

You can choose to let it be and carry on ... it may work as it; until 
one day ....

Or you can re-examine the details of what step may have been missed or 
overlooked and eventually you may achieve a standard Linux partition 
structure.  By the end of it all, you may believe you qualify for 
Enlightenment, Sainthood or the Nobel Peace Prize -- but what you will 
have in fact is a standard functional and stable Linux.

As a rule, never trust scripts or macros unless you know each and every 
step what the program does.

Good Luck ....

On Feb 28, 2006, at 4:06 PM, Keith Mitchell wrote:

>
> I have actually done all that... but I am installing these machines 
> via kickstart (i.e. without the normal GUI).... perhaps that is 
> broken.