Install Hoary ppc on Wallstreet (oldworld mac)?

[Peter Lieverdink]

At 06:29 AM 8/07/2005, Rainer Gutkas wrote:
>I whish I could tell you I had luck with this attempt, but unfortiunally I 
>didn't manage to get hoary working on the wallstreet I got. But if anyone 
>knows the trick I'm highly interested!

I've had various Linux flavours running on mine, including Debian sarge, so 
if that works, Ubuntu should work too.

The way I've always gone about it is to first use a MacOS install CD and 
create a MacOS partition of around 150Mb with a basic MacOS installed on 
it.  (HFS partition, not HFS+) The rest I leave as free space. Once that's 
done, I fetch BootX and set it up with the kernel and initrd from the Linux 
CD. That leaves you with a way to boot the install kernel and the install 
system via BootX, under MacOS. Just make sure the Linux CD is in the cd 
driver when you boot and that you pass the correct ramdisk_size param to 
the install kernel.

When linux boots, partition and install as per normal, just make sure you 
leave the HFS partition intact. The 'Install boot loader' step will fail, 
which is fine. Do not reboot the system yet, but get a shell via Alt-F2. 
Now you need to copy the newly installed kernel and initrd.img from 
/target/boot to the 'Linux kernels' folder on MacOS. (If the install kernel 
doesn't support hfs filesystems, a network server will come in very handy 
at this point) Once that's done, you boot back into MacOS, set up BootX 
with your new kernel and initrd.img and be sure to tell it what the root 
partition is. Set it to boot Linux by default, and off you go. Once Linux 
is booted, the installer will continue and set up the base system for you.

It's perhaps advisable to not go with Gnome or KDE, as Wallstreets aren't 
the fastest kids on the block anymore. That said, with an orinoco card and 
a an AMD64 running XDMCP, they're great roaming X terminals ;-)

Cheers,
- Peter.