Problems installing Yellow Dog Linux onto Old World Mac

[Eric Dunbar]

Hi Jeffrey,

I can tell you with certainty that YDL 4.0.1 DOES work on my Beige
G3/266 OldWorld Mac and that it works WELL.

I have been running YDL 4.0.1 since 05/05 (at least, I think so ;-)
and YDL 4.0 since early '05 (I think). And, to top it all off, my YDL
4.0.1 server has currently been up for 162 days, 14:56 hours:minutes
(as of 16:02 EST, 21:02 GMT) (no UPS either ;-).

On 22/08/06, Jeffrey Rolland <jrolland at softhome.net> wrote:
> Success! (Well, sorta ...)
>
> After screwing around a bit with kernels, ramdisks, and CDs, I
> arrived at a winning combo (I *knew* it was the kernel/ramdisk ...)

> For BootX, I was using the kernel vmlinux-2.4.22-2fBOOT. I was using
> ramdisk size 8192. I was using the "More Kernel arguments" of
> "video=controlfb:vmode:13,cmode:32". I was using the ramdisk supplied
> on the 3.0.1 CD.
>
> For the CD, I was using the 3.0.1 CD.
>
>
> Of course, this is an install of YDL 3.0.1, but, hey, it's an
> install! I have to agree with Eric that "YDL 4.[x] and the OldWorld
> Macs are simply not meant to be", although I will try using yum to
> update to 4.x after I have the 3.0.1 install completed. (Could
> someone give me a pointer to the info on how to update via CDs? I
> used to hace the link, but now I can't find it.)

See my comment above, YDL 4 and 4.0.1 DEFINITELY work and work well.

If you don't have a whole lot of time invested in configuring your YDL
3.0.1 install, I would strongly recommend that you do a FRESH install
of YDL 4.0(.1) rather than using yum.

Caveat:
It is possible to upgrade 3.0.1->4.0 using yum, but I did exactly that
using yum and ran into problems with X/KDE/GNOME so I had to do a
fresh install anyway (I had / and /home on separate partitions so I
didn't have to rebuild my user accounts).

A few points which might cause you problems with 4.0 or 4.0.1 (I can't
quite remember which version of 4 was afflicted by which problem):

1. SMB server (samba)... it isn't configured properly in the default
install so it has to be recompiled. It's not a difficult process but
you do need to know what questions to ask (I've posted instructions,
links and comments to this forum last year (not my solutions btw...
just repeating them));

See thread titled: "SMB problems... Fwd: SMB fileserve", dated 15/05/05:
<http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2005-May/>
<http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2005-May/019215.html>

2. The default kernel for YDL 4.0.1 is NOT compatible with the
OldWorld G3. You need to use the 4.0 kernel and then update the system
using yum to use an updated kernel;

3. Ethernet does not work out of the box on YDL 4.0.1. Again, as
someone (Daniel G) helpfully quipped, it's a 'feature' ;-)...

"
It's a feature, not a bug. add the following line to /etc/modprobe.conf:
alias eth0 bmac
" (12/05/05)

Good luck with 4.0.(1).

PS I haven't seen any reports of total success with YDL 4.1 on
OldWorld Macs (Andrew (virgule88) was working on it a few months
ago... ).