chuck's list account (cglist@mac-mgrs.org)
Tue, 6 Jul 1999 11:02:58 -0700
Hello folks and thanks for all the help and advice Friday as I made
my first run at installing Linux on my ANS 300 (aka deep dish).
On Friday I started to install from Scott Every's instructions
<ftp://ftp.emji.net/pub/ans> and *.coff files. I picked the ydl dist
since that had been recommended by several of you kind folks. I also
grabbed the files for both R4 & R5 of LinuxPPC. I managed to recover
my wayward R4 CD too just in case.
Performed the battery rituals.
To my amazement all of the boot floppies were able to boot the box
into the installer. I fully expected to have Open Firmware and the
dreaded DEFAULT CATCH be my highest hurdle. Having cleared this
easily I figured the rest would be all downhill. heh. In fact I did
get one Default Catch when I first booted, but after that everything
worked until...
No matter what I tried the YDL installer always failed at the same spot:
Retrieving base/stage2.img...
No matter if I tried YDL's ftp site, any of the listed mirrors, or
even a copy of the full source downloaded to a local machine and
accessed via ftp, it consistently failed at this step. The errors
varied: mostly complaining of a missing file, occasionally
complaining about the remote server. I assume the file it was
"missing" was the .../base/stage2.img file which I had no trouble
locating. After several attempts and a lot of time spent ftp'ing
files I gave up on the yellowdog and sent him home.
This consumed most of Friday and a good part of Sunday. My wife had
to work Sunday morning (She's a lawyer for the County, and the
criminal justice system is a machine with no 'stop' button, even on
Sundays & national holidays) so I took one of the kids to work with
me and figured I'd give it another go.
Since I had the R4 CD I tried that one next. I booted from Mr.
Every's ins.4.coff boot floppy and was able to start the installer. I
was then confronted with easily the most primitive disk formatting
utility I have seen in 10 years of UNIX administration. By the time I
got through it I was yearning fondly and misty eyed for SunOS 4.1.1...
Thankfully those long-dormant memory cells in my brain had not been
killed by one of the intervening occasional IT Staff tequila binges,
and I was able to format up my internal drive to what appeared (to me
at least) to be a fine set of partitions.
Unfortunately the installer then claimed that the disk did not have a
proper swap partition (despite fdisk's partition map showing me one)
and it failed too.
At this point my 5 year old accidentally locked me out of the server
room, which I took as my signal to hang it up for the day.
When I clear the decks for another attempt I figure I will try...
1. One person here suggested doing the YDL install via HTTP rather
than FTP. I guess I can move my source files into one of my
webserver's directory trees and give it a go from there.
2. Maybe I'll just buy a CD, either the YellowDog or R5, and try it
from local media.
3. Or yank the internal drive out of the box (easier said than done
on the deep dish, since it is mounted flush to the back of the LCD
panel) and try formatting it on another machine with a 20th century
disk formatter. No offence if the author of fdisk reads this but that
is a face that only a mother could love. Then I could have a go with
the R4 CD I already have in hand.
4. Or any combination of the above until it works.
again, thanks for all the help!
chuck goolsbee
seattle, wa
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue Jul 06 1999 - 11:14:42 PDT