Determined, newbie Old Codger fails 3x to install YDL

[Eric Dunbar]

Don, you may also want to consider using a smaller OS 9 partition if
do not plan on using OS 9 on your machine (or all you'll ever do is
browse the web... mind you, with YDL on there you may as well use
FireFox!).

If all you forsee using the machine for is YDL, all you need is a
bare-bones Mac OS install to help YDL get started (OS 8.1 is
sufficient). Even OS 9 can install in under 50 MB (I think... I'd set
the partition to 200 MB just to be on the safe side)... and you really
don't need much in the OS to get to the point where BootX takes over
(if you're creative with OS 9 & know what extensions & control panels
you can delete you could probably have OS 9 do it in under 20 MB).

Thoughts as a fairly recent newbie myself:

1. once you get YDL installed there's something called "yum" (tastes
good too ;P) that auto-magically updates YDL to the latest packages
(not 4.0 though AFAIK).

You'll have to change the "yum.conf" file to point to faster (less
used than the default) repositories where new RPMs (the installer
packages (rpm=redhat package manager)) are stored. There have been a
few discussions on the list in the past two months on how to change
your yum.conf file.

2. ctrl-option-F1 through F7 will change between different terminals
(?). F7 is the default X-windows one where your GUI will come up & if
you run MOL F8 is where it'll appear (please correct my terminology).

3. FireFox 0.10.xx and 0.9.3 and Mozilla 1.6.x(?) are available from
one of the alternate repositories (see the archives for discussion on
yum & FireFox). I'm partial to 0.9.3 (I have the RPM still if you want
it) b/c I found that 0.10.xx was crashing rather frequently.

4. I've discovered that you have to actually login as "root" (in one
of the F1-F6 sessions, or as root from the GUI login) to do things (&
"sudo" doesn't work out of the box like in OS X). su (substitute
user?) isn't enough sometimes.

5. pico is a fairly user-friendly command-line text editor which'll
allow you to do your configuration file editing & can handle
copy-paste (so can other CLUI editors). Editing configuration files is
a (relatively) simple process... most of the time it's simply copying
out instructions typed by someone else). ctrl-x quits, ctrl-y/v page
up/down (& I think page up/down work too) (instructions are readily
available in pico)

6. To run an application as "root" in your own GUI login (GNOME or
KDE... whatever is your poison), open up a terminal (don't switch to
another ctrl-opt-F1-6) in the GUI, su (default is to substitute in
root), type your password and then run whatever app you want to run as
root, e.g. "gedit" as a _nice_ GUI text editor for editing
configuration files.

7. There's a YDL FAQ at Sharplabs (I'm sure you can either find the
link in the archives or someone will be able to direct you to it).

8. YDL doesn't tell you if you run out disk space. Depending on your
drive set-up some parts (especially the GUI) will simply stop working.
There's a command called "du" that you can run from the command line
(also works in OS X) and there's also KDiskFree in the GUI.

9. man commandname will often show you an info sheet on a command-line
command, and commandname -h or --h or --help will often show you an
abbreviated list of modifierst that a particular command will
accept...
e.g. ls --help (I think that's it).

10. Don't despair. Help is out there (& chances are someone's
experienced it before & fixed it & left instructions on how to fix
it).

Eric.

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 08:09:38 -0800 (PST), Norberto Quintanar
<nquintanar at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The partition you will use for YDL has to be free space, do not
> partition it with the Mac OS disk, just leave it blank.  When you go
> to install YDL, just do an automatic partitioning and you will be
> golden.

> --- Don Maddox <don.maddox at om> wrote:
<snip>
> > The HD was initialised with 9.2.2 Drive set up to HFS and formatted
> > into two partitions. 1GB reserved for installing OS9.2.2 and the
> > remaining 5GB for YDL.  Each time I've followed the instructions
> > in the YDL 2.3 Companion and gone the BootX route.