| Accelerate Your Mac! Alt. OS feature:
Linux on the Mac By Xie Yi |
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About one or two weeks ago, someone asked
[in the xlr8yourmac.com news] about the installation of linux on VPC.
Well, finally it works for me. I just wanted to share some tips and let other
people save some time. Also, I am thinking asking some of your readers for
better English recompile this document as HOWTO [I did a quick scan and some corrections, but
will improve this later when I can.-Mike]
After many days of struggling and frustration, I finally got Linux RedHat
5.0 works on VPC2. During the try and fail process of installation, I
found use VPC have some better advantage over using true PC box. First,
partition is so easy and safe. Second, you are safe when you try some
dangerous things by just duplicate the hard drive. So, even the result is
disaster, like after lots of crash, the file system is damaged, I can
just trash the old one and use the copy.
There are some disadvantages though, as X-windows is slow. If you
don't have a G3 or 604e don't try it, even on my PowerCenter (upgraded
with PowerLogix PowerBoost Pro 233) it runs like Windoze95 on 486.
Several hardware emulations are not perfect, such as floppy drive which just
cannot mount a ext2 file system. I think that is the reason that you can
only use RedHat Zero-floppy or one-floppy installation options and not
the standard Slackware install.
Things you will need:
Here are the steps:
1. Copy VPC and preferences to a folder, I named it as Linux on VPC.
2. Double click VPC and create a new hard drive as C:, I created a 600 MB volume. I
think for a basic installation, 400 MB should be fine.)
3. Restart the PC and it will prompt you for system disk.
4. Insert the MSDOS installation floppy disk 1 and install it. (I only install the
first one, after that I quit the installation.)
5. Install the cd-rom driver for MSDOS.
6. CD to the D: drive and start the installation batch command. Depending on
where you have the CD, it can be 'install' or 'ezstart' or whatever. They
will finally call it 'autoboot.bat' in dosutils.
7. You answer a bunch of questions, such as color monitor, no SCSI host.
Then start to partition the drive. I don't know about you but I like to use FDISK.
8. First delete the whole DOS partition. You can use FIPS to compress the DOS
partition, but it will make problem later. The key thing here is you must
leave the first several sectors empty (something is wrong in hard drive
emulation here), otherwise LILO (Linux loader) won't be installed
successfully. Other partitions are normal, first is the major native Linux
partition, second is the Linux swap partition and I set last 10 MB as a DOS partition.
9. I don't know you, but after finishing a write of the partition table (don't
forgot to turn on native Linux and DOS partition bootable flag), I
restart VPC. This is to ensure that even if some step goes wrong, you
can always go back to DOS.
10. Reinstall MSDOS and the cd-rom driver and then restart the Linux installation
11. This time the Linux installation is pretty normal until the printer
configuration. Most of the hardware detection is autoprobe, so let
the installer do it. Here, just before or in the middle of printer
configuration, you should do "Cancel" once, so that you can be dropped
out from Express Install and do a step by step installation. I am not
really sure, but I figure it may still be due to a hard drive emulation
problem, if you do "set password" step, later you will not be able to login as root.
So, remember skip this step. Other steps are normal. Another thing you need
to be remember is tell Linux the alternative boot system is DOS.
12. After installing LILO, it will ask if you want to reboot the
computer, say Yes.
13. After the reboot, at the LILO prompt, type enter or linux.
14. Login as root, no password.
15. Next step is to configure X-windows.
16. First, mount the cdrom using the following command:
17. Change directory to (enter the following): cd /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS
18. Install vga16 sever (for whatever reason, the S3 sever is not working
for me): rpm -U XFree86-VGA16-3.3.1-14.i386.rpm
19. Run the x configurator: xf86config
20. The major configurations are:
22. I use vi: vi /etc/X11/xinit/.Xclients
23. The only thing I changed here is after it detects fvwm2rc.m4 there, it
tries to launch fvwm95, fvwm95-2, or fvwm2, but cannot find the path. But
actually, fvwm2 is there. So, I comment (#) out for loop and if statement
and add FVWMVER=2. Save it by first using the "Esc" key (command mode) shift-ZZ.
24. Now you can type: startx
That's it. Other rest is normal linux stuff and I am newbie here too.
So, ask around for help, or check the local bookstore for a good guide to Linux.
The only favor I ask is it that if anyone can get the ethernet card to work,
please send the
info on how it was done. I can activate it, but none of
network programs work.
Note: Use the above info at your own risk. No warranty of any kind is implied.
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I'm looking for someone to do a weekly column on alternate OS info for the Mac. If you're experienced with BeOS or Linux (any flavor) and would like to do a column here, please contact me. |
Disclaimer: Linux installs can be problematic. If you're not comfortable with the instructions here or have no experience with Linux, get knowledgeable help. This site cannot provide assistance on Linux other than the articles posted here. Always back up your data before any major OS upgrade or install. |