YDL 6.2 on Titanium powerbook

[steveH]

Has anyone been able to successfully install 6.2 (or 5.0, for that matter) in a 1GHz Titanium PowerBook?

The powerbook currently has OS X 10.5.8 installed, half the drive is formatted as free space. 1GB RAM, running completely normally as far as can be determined. It happily boots from various other bootable CDs and DVDs.

The YDL 6.2 DVD iso has correct SHA1 checksum, but will not boot. (Copies made on different media act identically.) Powering on holding down C key goes straight to OS X, powering on holding option key eventually shows both OS X and YDL icons; selecting penguin results in blink and return to option selection screen.

Identical behavior with YDL 5.0 installation DVD.

The machine would be a whole lot more useful if I could get YDL installed and working on it.

TIA.

[steveH]

Well, that was a restful week, crickets and all.

Figuring that the bloody Live CD isn't, apparently, is there anyone who might know how to install the bloodly distro by hand, since there doesn't seem to be any other way to install it on the machine without having Linux somehow already installed on it?

It would be nice to actually be able to use the hardware with the nice OS.

TIA.

[ppietro]

Are you using the Mac to burn this ISO by any chance? We are investigating some issues with our ISO images and Mac burning software.

This is kind of a long shot, but do you have access to a Windows machine that could burn the ISO? I freely admit I'm shooting in the dark here - but there seems to be an issue here that we haven't quite figured out yet.

As a follow-up issue - is there anyone on the forums who has successfully created a DVD from our ISO on a Mac and used it for an install? If so - what software did you use?

Cheers,
Paul

[steveH]

Are you using the Mac to burn this ISO by any chance?

Yes, using Disk Utility.app bundled with Mac OS X 10.6. On two different machines, and a couple different media just in case that makes a difference (which has been the case a couple times in the dim, misty past).

I was, quite literally, trying to follow the directions for burning/installing YDL 6.2 on a PowerPC Mac, including using Disk Utility to burn the image.

We are investigating some issues with our ISO images and Mac burning software.

I'd like to hear how that shakes out. I know that I had installed YDL, SuSE and Ubuntu on the same machine, but several years ago, which is what's got me scratching my head now.

This is kind of a long shot, but do you have access to a Windows machine that could burn the ISO? I freely admit I'm shooting in the dark here - but there seems to be an issue here that we haven't quite figured out yet.

Sort of. I've got Win2K Server running under emulation on both newer (Intel) Macs here. Other than that, my son has a Dell laptop he uses at work that might could do the job. Won't see him, likely, for a week or two.

As a follow-up issue - is there anyone on the forums who has successfully created a DVD from our ISO on a Mac and used it for an install? If so - what software did you use?

Cheers,
Paul

This should be fun. (I hope!)

[ppietro]

This might be relevant:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6829&p=34478#p34478

Cheers,
Paul

[steveH]

Looks like either digging up a PC of some sort to burn the .iso image, or else some other tool on Mac OS X to do it, as Disk Utility may not do it right.

And a virtualized WinPC may not be good enough.

Hope someone surfaces with something better, else I'll try it in a few days, modulo access, etc.

Thanks for the pointer.

[steveH]

Backed up and wiped the drive of my MacBook Pro last night.

Installed Ubuntu 9.04, and used it to burn a couple of different LiveCDs of PowerPC linux variants.

No joy.

Left to try: Burn the iso files on some WinPC. If they fail, it's try to get a network install going.

Is that even possible without an installed linux already being in place?

[steveH]

I just had something like a thought... Before running off to work on an approach that might be a non-starter from the beginning, I thought I'd throw this out.

Since I can run the TiBook as a FireWire drive, and I can run Linux on either of my other intel Macs, would it perhaps be possible to do this:

- Connect the TiBook as an external hard drive to one of the other machines running Linux.

- Install the YDL 6.2 from the DVD on the TiBook, hopefully by running the installation scripts on the DVD.

- Be done with this whole evolution, and get on with actually using YDL on the old laptop.

Doable, or am I missing something exceptionally obvious?

[tkil]

This looks like the same problem that I (and a few others) are having:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6714

Might just try an earlier release and see if that even boots.

Edit: meant that I should just try an earlier release. Sorry for the confusion!

[steveH]

I followed that thread (as far as it had progressed), with similar non-results before I started this thread.

I've also tried burning iso files for different PowerPC linux versions (Ubuntu 9.04), and earlier YDL versions (5.0).

All with a similar degree of failure.

I'm leaning toward installing on the TiBook while using it as a FireWire drive, if I can figure out how to install YDL 6.2 on it while the host machine is running a different version of Linux (Ubuntu 9.04-x86, most likely). I doesn't take all that long to wipe the MacBook Pro, install LInux, and run with that.

If it's possible, say, to run the installation scripts on the YDL DVD to install on the TiBook-that-thinks-it's-a-harddrive.

Or if it would be possible to install off the local 'net, assuming there's no bootstrap issue with getting the installation to work on a machine that isn't already running some version of Linux.

My enthusiasm for the whole project, frankly, is beginning to flag just a bit.

[tkil]

FWIW, it looks like some TiBooks have issues with device assignments in the Open Firmware. I managed to get Linux installed on mine, finally. (I ended up going with Fedora 11, since that's the distro I know best, but I suspect that it's a similar problem causing issues with the YDL installs.)

Details here: http://tkil.livejournal.com/53177.html

My TiBook is now happily puttering along, currently being my home version control / dns cache / squid cache box.

Good luck on your own project!

[Robert Z]

SteveH,

I'm sorry to hear how much trouble you had trying to install Linux on your Titanium PowerBook. I just bought a Titanium PowerBook on eBay this week, and I also encountered the problem of not being able to boot from Linux optical discs - even though the PowerBook boots from a Mac OS DVD, when I press "c" or "alt" during start-up.

But I found a solution! This involved using my iMac (which can boot Debian CDs) to install a PPC Linux system on an external FireWire hard drive. I had done that before, just to not use the loud internal hard drive. Again, I mainly followed this tutorial:
http://www.howtoforge.com/boot_debian_f ... l_firewire

This time I had to manually mount /target (and/target/dev, and /target/proc) before the chroot, though.

Then, using this system on the firewire hard drive on the PowerBook (and the chroot tricks again), I installed yaboot on the PowerBook's internal hard drive (which, in my case, had a Ubuntu 9.04 on it anyway - but I could have copied it from the firewire drive or some other media just as well).

I prefer Ubuntu and Debian over YellowDog (which I also tried because it includes libfreevec) for a number of reasons: more packages, less outdated packages, faster and more flexible (IMHO) package manager, working "fdisk -l" with Apple partitions, better yaboot configuration (taking into account existing Linux systems), ...

It might be possible to achieve similar results using the FireWire target mode, as you suggested, but I'm not sure about that, since the target /dev/sda would later become /dev/hda, when booting the PowerBook.

Another option might be the bootloader grub2, which should be a lot more flexible than yaboot.

Send me a message, if you'd like to see my kernel config and/or yaboot.conf!

If you don't have a second PPC system, a virtual system like qemu might also do the job. That would be more work again, of course...

Good luck!