trouble installing Yellow Dog Linux

[Derick Centeno]

Hi Chris:
Generally, before you install YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) you need to format 
the drive onto which YDL will exist.

If only YDL will exist on that drive then before you run the installer 
you need to boot from the Apple System Disk which came with your 
computer.  In other words before we get to do anything involving Linux 
or YDL we need to format the drive using Apple's Disk Utility which 
resides within the System Disk (if you have the DVD form of that System 
Disk which comprises the Hardware Test and everything else for OS X 
otherwise you'll have a string of CDs; either way the program to use 
will be Apple's Disk Utility regardless and it  should see the entire 
drive you intend to dedicate to YDL.  As nothing else but YDL will be 
on that drive all you need to do is select it to create 1 partition and 
select the kind of partition called Free Space.  It is important to 
note here that although Disk Utility calls it Free Space, in actually 
that is the format structure upon which YDL will use to create ext3 
partition from that free space.

After Disk Utility creates what it considers to be Free Space if the 
Drive was mounted, it will disappear from the desktop.  OS X will ask 
you to mount the drive, choose instead to ignore that request; in other 
words ignore the drive.  After Disk Utility has finished creating the 
Free Partition, and you've closed that application.  Then boot from the 
YDL installation disk and tell YDL to format that newly formatted 
drive.  Be sure that you can recognize which drive you are formatting 
and read the partition maps of which drive you are telling the YDL 
installer (anaconda) to turn into a Linux or YDL only disk.

It might be a good idea to review the installation manual before 
proceeding further.
If you need to review a manual regarding the instructions just download 
it (for free) from here:

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/support/installation/

I expect that the rest should be smooth sailing from that point.
Good Luck...

On Mar 15, 2006, at 2:39 PM, Christopher Nunu wrote:

> I'm having trouble creating the partitions for Yellow Dog. I own a G5 
> iMac (PowerPC) with 1GB of RAM, and am trying to install Yellow Dog on 
> a LaCie 40GB Mobile Hard Drive brand new, no previous OS installed on 
> it. The drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (not journaled). When I 
> boot from the Yellow Dog install disk, and enter install firewire at 
> the "boot" prompt, i get all the way to the manual partitioning with 
> Disk  Druid. It lets me partition the Apple Bootstrap (although I 
> notice that it partitions at 8mb, even though I told it to partition 
> as 1mb. When I try to create the swap partition at 512mb, it gives me 
> a "cannot allocate partition error". The same thing happens when I try 
> to make the root partition.
>
> Anyone know how to correct this, preferably FREELY? I know I could use 
> iPartition to make the partitions for me, but spending $50 on 
> something I'll probably use once is not exactly appealing. Do I need 
> to format the drive in some other format (such as FAT32), or is there 
> another way?
>
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