Firewire installation problems & solution

[Martin Jerabek]

Hi!

Like other people here I had problems installing YDL 4.1 on an external 
firewire drive. My Mac is an iBook G3 900MHz. Despite booting with 
"install firewire" the installer simply did not list the firewire drive, 
so I could not install anything on it. The drive itself worked well 
under Mac OS X, so I knew it was only a software problem. The dmesg 
output did not show any traces of the firewire controller or drives, so 
it was not surprising that the installer did not offer it.

After some experiments I found the following solution which allowed me 
to install YDL 4.1 on a firewire drive and boot from it. It is a bit 
involved but it has only be done once. Maybe someone can find an easier way:

- Boot from the installation CD with "install firewire".
- Wait until the graphical installer is started and switch to a console 
with a shell by pressing Alt+Ctrl+F2 (on iBooks you also have to press 
Fn simultaneously to get the function key).
- Extract the kernel firewire modules by entering the following commands 
(everything after gunzip must be on the same line):
cd /modules
gunzip -c modules.cgz | cpio -id 
2.6.15-rc5.ydl.1/ppc/{ieee1394.ko,ohci1394.ko,sbp2.ko}

If this does not create a 2.6.15-rc5.ydl.1/ppc subdirectory you can list 
the contents of the cpio archive with
gunzip -c modules.cgz | cpio -t
to see if the directory names are different in your version.

- Load the firewire kernel modules:
cd 2.6.15-rc5.ydl.1/ppc
modprobe ieee1394.ko
modprobe ohci1394.ko
modprobe sbp2.ko

- If you enter "dmesg" now the firewire drive(s) should be listed at the 
end of its output. I have a firewire DVD drive and a harddisk; the DVD 
drive is sr0, and the harddisk is sda.

- Create device entries for the firewire harddisk:
cd /dev
makedevs sda b 8 0 0 31 s

- For unknown reasons the installer still did not recognize the firewire 
harddisk but entering

list-harddrives

fixed it.

- Switch back to the graphical installer with Alt+Ctrl+F7 (again with Fn 
if necessary) and start the installation. The disk partitioner should 
now list the firewire drive (in my case as "sda") and let you install 
YDL on it.


BOOTING
In my case the installation went smoothly but I could not boot from the 
firewire drive by holding Alt during the restart and choosing the 
firewire drive as the boot device. I could select the firewire drive and 
start to boot from it but when I entered "l" to boot Linux my Mac simply 
returned to the graphical boot device chooser (with slightly wrong 
colors). At 
http://apfelwiki.de/wiki/Main/TastenkombinationenBeimRechnerstart (in 
German, sorry) I found the key combination

Cmd+Alt+Shift+Backspace

(held during restart) which boots from the external harddisk. I do not 
know what happens if there are several externals harddisk but I have 
only one, so it worked fine. The boot process got stuck for a few 
seconds during "Scanning for Firewire Disks" but afterwards it proceeded 
normally and brought up a functional Linux installation. I still do not 
get network connectivity because DHCP fails but this is another story.

BTW: why, oh why, do users with German keyboards still have to patch the 
keyboard layout files manually to get access to characters which require 
AltGr (like |)? This problem has been known for years. What can be done 
that this is fixed in future versions of YDL?

Anyway, I hope these explanations help other people who run into the 
same problem as I did. I do not know why the firewire drive was not 
detected automatically and why I had to jump through these hoops but I 
am happy that it eventually worked. If someone from Terrasoft Solutions 
wants to track down the problem I would be glad to help. I am a Unix 
programmer by profession so I am not completely clueless about Linux.

Regards
Martin "Jerry" Jerabek