iYAN inside! Online Index SoftwareLinux for PowerPC 5
In a world dominated by Intel boxes, many will be surprised that Macintosh users can also have an alternative. In this review, we review and give step-by-step instructions on installing and configuring. Plus, a brief comparison between Intel and PowerPC is offered.
LinuxPPC, an implementation of Red Hat Linux for PCI PowerPC machines, has grown into its fifth generation and brings the best the Intel world has to offer to the PowerPC (and Power Macintosh) architecture. LinuxPPC 4.0 used a modified Red Hat installer and on Power Macintosh machines some tools from Mklinux (http://www.mklinux.apple.com or http://www.mklinux.org) for hard disk partitioning as Apple uses a partitioning scheme different from the one used on IBM compatible Intel (or PowerPC) machines.
Installation
On Power Macintosh hardware (only PCI machines are supported!) booting the installer is somewhat easy. The CD comes with an application to boot Linux, a "live filesystem" (essentially a 70 MB image file of a Linux root filesystem), and all necessary Red Hat files and RPMs (Red Hat's archive files) that are needed for installation. All that has to be done is to start the boot application ("Install LinuxPPC"). Doing this will shutdown MacOS and boot into the live filesystem on the CD, which will then go on loading X11 and the new graphical installer.
The installer offers several features, including a "Welcome" message that points the user to a program called "pdisk" which he should run under the MacOS to partition the machine's hard disk first. Said program can be found on the CD in the folder "macosutils". However, it is is not necessary to reboot and run pdisk under the MacOS. It is possible to just close the installer (to make it recognize any changes made to the hard disk afterwards) and click on the desktop to get a menu that contains not only the above installer but also a menupoint for launching an XTerm terminal window. One can easily run the Linux (actually MkLinux) version of pdisk and partition the hard disk from there, assuming that there is either enough free (unpartitioned) space on the machine's hard disk or a second hard disk not used by the MacOS at all. In my case I left about 2.4 GB for Linux and could thus go on partitioning these for Linux (another 128 MB were free on a second hard disk, which I used for swapspace).
Using pdisk I partitioned my 2.4 GB as follows:6: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root 2000000 @ 4001245 (976.6M) 7: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 usr 2923755 @ 6001245 ( 1.4G)(Only relevant partitions are shown.)
And the 128 MB on the other hard disk looks like:
6: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap 225480 @ 4001245 (110.1M)(Ok, it is not really 128 MB, but this is what was left on my second hard drive.)
After writing my new partition table to the disk ("w") and exiting pdisk ("q") one can safely exit XTerm and restart the installer from the desktop menu. It will see the new partitions on the disk and give you the chance to mount them according to your plans for installation. In the installer's "Select Partitions" menu I defined my partition 6 (976.6 MB) as root ("/") and my 1.4 GB partition as user partition ("/usr").
The next two menupoints in the installer concern the installation of the Red Hat packages on the CD, and it seems that the installer does not care anyway which packages one selects for installlation and which one wants not to be installed. It will simply install whatever it wants, it seems. I wanted to install everything and realized, after the installation, that some files were missing. The missing packages included the configuration panel for the default window manager "Enlightenment" and several other tools for the desktop Gnome, including some themes (backgrounds and window styles) for that window manager. However, it is possible to install them afterwards.
The last issue in the installer concerns the network setup, and I can only suggest to be _very careful_ with anything that concerns the network setting of LinuxPPC at this early stage of its installed "life". At least my machine would not boot Linux after the installation when I entered the hostname of my machine too early. Thus I would recommend not to change anything but the IP address in this window.
After installation, the machine will reboot and Linux can be started using the BootX application which can also be found in the macosutils folder ("BootX_1.1.sit"). BootX consists of two files, the BootX application itself, which can be placed anywhere, preferably with an alias in the Apple menu, and a MacOS boot extension which should be placed in the extensions folder (it is enough to drag and drop the file on the active system folder on the boot volume) to make it possible to boot into Linux without having to wait for MacOS to load first. LinuxPPC comes with a selection of pre-compiled kernels which can be found in the folder "Linux Kernels" on the CD and should be placed in the folder with the same name in the BootX folder. Later the kernels will usually get replaced with a custom kernel configured and compiled for the individual machine, of course.
BootX can also be used to boot MkLinux using an MkLinux plugin which can be found in the BootX folder hierarchy on the CD.
After the boot issues have been solved Linux can be started (by selecting "Linux" instead of "MacOS" in BootX).
Red Hat
Instead of the graphical installer the old style Red Hat installer can be used by adding the word "redhat" (without the quotes) to the kernel arguments line in the BootX window that comes up when starting "Install LinuxPPC" on the CD.
The Red Hat installer hasn't changed much since prior releases of LinuxPPC (or Red Hat Linux for that matter) and can still be useful if the graphical installer is unable to start up for some reason.
There is one thing to note about both installers though. It seems to be impossible to set the keyboard type to anything other than US-English as they keyboard map files for any other setting (like French or German) are simply missing. In the Red Hat installer selecting anything other than the default keyboard setting (American) results in the keyboard being unusable and this usually results in a hard reboot. The graphical installer does not even have an option for setting the keyboard type, not even using the XTerm terminal window.
