Graham Perkins (gperkins@IS.Dal.Ca)
Tue, 6 Jul 1999 15:37:40 -0300 (ADT)
Probably what the problem is, the buggy RedHat based installer... When
I put on LinuxPPC R5 on my ANS 500, I found I had to put my first DNS
Server name in WRONG, which prevents the installer from doing a reverse
name lookup... that way the installer would prompt me with the
second network setup screen, which would allow me to put in my host name,
domain, secondary & tertiary dns servers. Then in your hostname field, put
in the hostname, WITHOUT the domain, in the domain field, just put your
domain.
Graham Perkins (gperkins@is.dal.ca)
Academic Computing Services Help Desk
Dalhousie University
(902)494-2376
On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, chuck's list account wrote:
> 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 - 11:41:50 PDT