Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

If you have problems installing YDL, or need some information before you start.

Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby Farinet » 08 Oct 2010, 14:24

When i'm starting my G4 PB with the YDL installation dvd the installer offers me either to install YDL to the internal hd (where MacOS X is) or to an external disk which is attached. Intalling to the external hd the internal hd would be left as it is or would it be reformatted/destroyed as well?

TIA for any answer :)
Farinet
ydl newbie
ydl newbie
 
Posts: 7
Joined: 08 Oct 2010, 14:19

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby billb » 09 Oct 2010, 14:37

Hi -- I don't have a Mac for testing -- just PS3 -- but at least on the PS3 I don't believe the YDL installer will work for booting from an external drive without some modification after installation.

Regarding your internal HD, just pay close attention to the disk partition setup during installation. When I install on the PS3 it selects all attached drives by default and you'll need to uncheck your internal HD partition(s) if you want it to leave those alone, and also note the selection for which drive to boot from and change that from your internal drive to the external if needed.

Hopefully one of the Mac users will come along and provide more details and/or corrections to what I've already mentioned. :wink:
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby Farinet » 14 Oct 2010, 12:11

Thanks! I resolved by mirroring the existing hd and installed YDL 6.2 on all the hd. Not that bad so far, but actually i've a question on how i can get to work the wireless connection to the router. The broadcom chi based is not recognized (hardwarewise yes, but not working; it wasn't working correctly as well under mac os x, so far) and the same goes for a rt2870 based usb stick.

I'm out of ideas . . . Could you point me to where i should ask the related questions? (I've some basic linux experiences since i'm using ubuntu since several generations on a sony vaio).

Thanks so far.
Farinet
ydl newbie
ydl newbie
 
Posts: 7
Joined: 08 Oct 2010, 14:19

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby billb » 14 Oct 2010, 12:41

I don't know if this will help (written for YDL 6.1), but:

http://www.ydl.net/support/solutions/yd ... reme.shtml
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby Farinet » 14 Oct 2010, 16:14

Thanks, but it did not help . . . :-(
Farinet
ydl newbie
ydl newbie
 
Posts: 7
Joined: 08 Oct 2010, 14:19

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby aguilarojo » 14 Oct 2010, 23:35

Farinet wrote:Thanks! I resolved by mirroring the existing hd and installed YDL 6.2 on all the hd. ...


Hi Farinet, in addressing an earlier question regarding YDL. YDL 6.2 and earlier are designed to boot from the internal drive. Preparing the internal drive on the G4 entails quite a bit of work which is not obvious unless you study the installation instructions for YDL 6.2 rather carefully.

Plainly speaking the installation process starts first with booting from the Apple Install DVD for OS X and using Apple's disk formatter from within that Apple Install DVD; it is called: Disk Utility. It is accessed through the menu which appears at the same time the window offering options to initiate the installation of Apple's software appears. At that point one is invoking Disk Utility, not the Apple installation procedures.

The importance of using Disk Utility is that it alone is capable of formatting the internal drive both for OS X and for YDL - at the same time. It is therefore a timesaver if the process is done correctly. Within Disk Utility you'll notice the name of the HD and it's current partition structure presented as a bar graph. Of course, before you've reached this point you will have backed-up all your documents. You'll also need to reinstall OS X and associated Apple programs you use. The partition structure is to be changed from just hfs or hfs+ (which allows for journaling) either of which OS X can use to be hfs and Untitled (also known as "free space"). This Untitled section defined within Disk Utility creates the partition structure upon which the YDL Install DVD disk will use to build ext3 partitions which Linux needs in order to function.

Of course you will have built your YDL Install DVD disk from having tested the .iso file you downloaded using sha1sum. Using the sha1sum to test against the original sha1sum value posted by Fixstars you'll be able to determine if you have a perfect copy. That perfect copy is then used to build the YDL Install DVD which then can be relied upon to be complete.

Special Note: Be sure that when you choose to install YDL that you choose the correct partition for Anaconda (the name of the installation program) to install onto otherwise you will destroy your OS X partition (which you recreated with Apple's Disk Utility) and YDL won't be properly installed because that was an hfs or hfs+ partition not a "free" partition which YDL would recognize that would allow it to build ext3!! The result instead could be the instability of an entire hard drive (HD).

Special Note 2: Apple designates various versions of OS X as different names of the big felines, such as Tiger and Leopard. The version known as Tiger can use either hfs or hfs+; Leopard however can only use hfs+. Also Apple announced sometime ago that Leopard is the final version of OS X to support the PowerPC. Snow Leopard supports Intel Macs only.

Remember that the overall intention is a stable and reliable dual-booting system in which OS X and YDL can be booted from and selected by utilizing the open firmware application. Getting to this point is not straightforward without careful study of the installation instructions.

Farinet wrote:...i've a question on how i can get to work the wireless connection to the router. The broadcom chi based is not recognized (hardwarewise yes, but not working; it wasn't working correctly as well under mac os x, so far) and the same goes for a rt2870 based usb stick.

I'm out of ideas . . . Could you point me to where i should ask the related questions? ...


If the procedures I recommended above have been completed correctly, then you should have within the correctly prepared YDL Install DVD all the official software needed for a pristine and complete YDL installation. It's a lot easier to move forward from the point of certainty then yum and all the other standard Linux tools should be able to be installed, acquired or built (compiled) as necessary.

You've got to acquire the fwcutter to extract the broadcom driver from OS X. Unfortunately although broadcom is providing open source drivers now, those new drivers don't work for the chipset embedded within G4 laptops.

Assuming that you successfully concluded the installation process and both OS X and YDL function as they should then if you still have the difficulty you've reported you should report here, in this thread or elsewhere on the YDL Board, what output you have from within YDL.

Everything on the Earth has a purpose.
Every disease an herb to cure it.
And every person has a mission.
This is the Indian Theory of Existence.
-- Morning Dove, Salish (1888-1936)
User avatar
aguilarojo
ydl guru
ydl guru
 
Posts: 227
Joined: 06 May 2009, 14:50
Location: New York City

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby Farinet » 17 Oct 2010, 23:10

aguilarojo wrote:
Farinet wrote:Thanks! I resolved by mirroring the existing hd and installed YDL 6.2 on all the hd. ...


Hi Farinet, in addressing an earlier question regarding YDL. YDL 6.2 and earlier are designed to boot from the internal drive. Preparing the internal drive on the G4 entails quite a bit of work which is not obvious unless you study the installation instructions for YDL 6.2 rather carefully. . . . .


Hi, thanks for your detailed instructions but, obviously i missed to explain my problem.

Actually, i have installed YDL 6.2 on a G4 PB 17" - as standalone OS - and so far, that's fine.

BUT: I was unable to establish any internet connection since i cannot get working neither the internal Airport Extrem card. The braodcom driver is missing (unlike the Ubuntu PPC version); moreover i'm afraid the airport wifi is defective since it was already not really reliably under MacOs X 10.4.

I have a USB Wlan stick (D-Link DWA 140) which should work under linux and i even found the packages which should contain the needed drivers (rt2870-2.4.0.1-1.fc13.src.rpm and rt2870-firmware-2.3.0.0-1mamba.noarch.rpm - using another computer). I tried to install that packages by "yum localinstall <packagename>" but that didn't work. Yum told me it did not find the Terrasoft mirror and it could not resolve the name - which i'm taking in the way, yum is looking to get an internet connection, which obviously is impossible until i' m not getting to work the wifi (in one way or another).

Now, is there a way to install that packages anyway locally? I'm not so familiar with yum and the commandline procedures so, any help is really welcome :)

TIA
Farinet
ydl newbie
ydl newbie
 
Posts: 7
Joined: 08 Oct 2010, 14:19

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby billb » 18 Oct 2010, 00:03

Farinet wrote:I have a USB Wlan stick (D-Link DWA 140) which should work under linux and i even found the packages which should contain the needed drivers (rt2870-2.4.0.1-1.fc13.src.rpm and rt2870-firmware-2.3.0.0-1mamba.noarch.rpm - using another computer). I tried to install that packages by "yum localinstall <packagename>" but that didn't work. Yum told me it did not find the Terrasoft mirror and it could not resolve the name - which i'm taking in the way, yum is looking to get an internet connection, which obviously is impossible until i' m not getting to work the wifi (in one way or another).


A src.rpm includes the original source archive, any patches, a .spec file which tells the rpmbuild command how to extract, patch, compile, what/where files are installed, build requirements, special requirements to run, etc. So you can't install a src.rpm (aka SRPM) that way, but it's often useful to use one for creating your own rebuild of an rpm for your system.

The noarch.rpm means you should be able to install it on any CPU architecture, but still it may be for a particular Linux distribution so there's no guarantee it will work.

Creating an rpm package from a srpm package is not terribly difficult, but it's best to configure your system for building them first. So here goes...

Steps:

1. Set up your system so you can build RPMs using your regular user account instead of root:

Create the directories needed: (logged in as regular user, not root)

Code: Select all
mkdir ~/rpmbuild

Code: Select all
cd rpmbuild

Code: Select all
mkdir BUILD  RPMS  SOURCES  SPECS  SRPMS

Create an .rpmmacros file in your home directory which points to the ~/rpmbuild directory you just created:

Code: Select all
echo %_topdir $HOME/rpmbuild > ~/.rpmmacros

The contents of ~/.rpmmacros file should look something like this now:

%_topdir /home/bill/rpmbuild
(with your username instead of mine, of course)

2. Then you can either try a straight rebuild of the src.rpm or use rpm to install the src.rpm and build from the .spec file (which is a text file you can review or modify as needed).

If you install the src.rpm using this (still as regular user, not root!):

rpm -ivh /path/to/your.src.rpm

It will install the source archive and spec file in your ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES and ~/rpmbuild/SPECS directories you created earlier. NOTE: Recent versions of Fedora and probably other distros use a different version of rpm/rpmbuild that may create problems when you try to install the src.rpm using the method above. In that case, you can open the src.rpm in the archive manager (file-roller) and extract the files to the appropriate directories manually).

For rebuilding a src.rpm with no changes, you can try:

setarch ppc rpmbuild --rebuild --ppc /path/to/your.src.rpm

If you want to build from the .spec file (which you may want to review since it will (usually) show packages required to build), then:

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
setarch ppc rpmbuild -ba --ppc filename.spec
(replace filename with actual name of spec file)

If the rpmbuild command isn't found you'll need to install that -- I believe it should be on your install DVD. You can browse the contents of the DVD and just double-click on it to open in software installer if needed. Or use rpm -ivh /path/to/the.rpm to install ...

3. Assuming rpmbuild manages to finish with an exit 0 (no error) you should have a new rpm package in your ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/ppc (or noarch depending on what you're building) directory which you can install using the rpm -ivh command. Note that rpm doesn't fetch dependencies for you, so if the package requires other rpm's you'll need to install them manually as well.

There are huge amounts of documentation on rpm building, spec files, etc. so this is just a very quick crash-course! :wink:
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby aguilarojo » 18 Oct 2010, 00:44

Farinet wrote:
Hi, thanks for your detailed instructions but, obviously i missed to explain my problem.

Actually, i have installed YDL 6.2 on a G4 PB 17" - as standalone OS - and so far, that's fine.

BUT: I was unable to establish any internet connection since i cannot get working neither the internal Airport Extrem card. The braodcom driver is missing (unlike the Ubuntu PPC version); moreover i'm afraid the airport wifi is defective since it was already not really reliably under MacOs X 10.4.


Could you explain in more detail how you organized your system? Are you suggesting that YDL was installed on the internal hard drive with no partitions on that internal drive for OS X? Did you choose to install OS X onto the external drive you mentioned earlier? If you did that this is not a problem for OS X because OS X can run from either an external drive or internal drive - OS X doesn't care where it is, which works to your advantage.

Except for one thing -- the instructions for extracting the broadcom driver from OS X which Billb provided for you earlier in this thread assumes that OS X is sharing the same internal hard drive within a different partition of the internal drive! If you did install OS X onto an external drive then within YDL you have to do the following:


  • Get YDL to see and recognize that external drive where OS X is located. To do this a physical connection is necessary like a USB or Firewire cable which YDL will have no trouble seeing however different Linux desktop environments behave very differently when it comes to mounting external drives. So if you are in Gnome, XFCE or Enlightenment you'll have to engage in different mount procedures for the external hard drive to be recognized. The standard YDL desktop environment is e17, although you still may need to mount the external hard drive manually using Linux commands. There are instructions written regarding these procedures which you can find somewhere on Fixstar's website.

  • Then extract the broadcom driver from OS X which is located on the external drive!

Before I can recommend one or another strategy you need to provide more details regarding your hardware, such as:



  • The physical connections between the external hard drive in use and the computer.

  • Where OS X and YDL exactly are located on different partitions sharing the same internal drive. You should know how to find out this information. If you don't know how to do this within YDL, just say so.

  • Or is OS X on the external drive or is YDL?
  • Which version of OS X are you using? Leopard or Snow Leopard??

    One more point: Keep in mind that the original instructions which BillB provided were instructions for extracting the broadcom driver from OS X v. 10.3 also known as Tiger. Your difficulty extracting the broadcom driver, if you are doing it correctly, could be caused by a change which Apple made to Leopard. It may be that the broadcom driver can't be extracted from Leopard; instead you may need to reinstall and use the original version of OS X which came with the Powerbook - which in fact was, Tiger. Using this strategy will allow you to extract the broadcom driver from OS X so that it may be installed into YDL as per the directions BillB provided for you. Once that is done and Wicd is up and running which also signifies that YDL is using the broadcom driver, then you are free to reinstall Leopard and remove Tiger, should you wish to do so. YDL won't be affected.

Everything on the Earth has a purpose.
Every disease an herb to cure it.
And every person has a mission.
This is the Indian Theory of Existence.
-- Morning Dove, Salish (1888-1936)
User avatar
aguilarojo
ydl guru
ydl guru
 
Posts: 227
Joined: 06 May 2009, 14:50
Location: New York City

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby Farinet » 18 Oct 2010, 08:52

Thanks a lot. That explains something.

Ok, YDL sits on the internal hd - as standalone (i don't have any MacOS X anymore save the MacOS X 10.27 recover and install dvd). The organisation of the hd is like this:

/dev/hda
/dev/hda2 Apple Bootstrap 1 1 1
/dev/hda3 ext3 100 1 13
/dev/hda4 ext3 74226 13 9476
/dev/hda5 swap 1992 97776 9730

Sorry, when i'm ingenious ;-), i get you right, the firmware is extracted from MacOS (not from the chip itself)? So the described strategy to get working the airport card supposes the existence of a MacOS - somewhere in the computer (internal or external, doesn't matter)?

As mentioned before, it might be more reasonable to use the w-lan stick than the internal (original) airport because the latter very likely is defective, hardwarewise.

I'll try the way bill explained to deal locally with rpm packages and get back here after.

Thanks a lot for the moment to both of you!!!! :D
Farinet
ydl newbie
ydl newbie
 
Posts: 7
Joined: 08 Oct 2010, 14:19

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby aguilarojo » 18 Oct 2010, 17:53

Farinet wrote:Thanks a lot. That explains something.

Ok, YDL sits on the internal hd - as standalone (i don't have any MacOS X anymore save the MacOS X 10.27 recover and install dvd). The organisation of the hd is like this:

/dev/hda
/dev/hda2 Apple Bootstrap 1 1 1
/dev/hda3 ext3 100 1 13
/dev/hda4 ext3 74226 13 9476
/dev/hda5 swap 1992 97776 9730

Sorry, when i'm ingenious ;-), i get you right, the firmware is extracted from MacOS (not from the chip itself)? So the described strategy to get working the airport card supposes the existence of a MacOS - somewhere in the computer (internal or external, doesn't matter)?


Hi Farinet, I'll work through your query in sub-sections for the sake of achieving greater clarity towards discovering where the problem resides. First, what does YDL see of the hard drive structure? The best way to examine what is going on is to use the application called parted (short for partition editor). It is activated as follows:

Code: Select all

[aguila@arakus ~]$ su -
Password:

[root@arakus ~]# parted -l

Model: Hitachi IC25N060ATMR04-0 (ide)
Disk /dev/hda: 60.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: mac

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
 1      0.51kB  32.8kB  32.3kB               Apple                     
 2      32.8kB  1081kB  1049kB  hfs          untitled              boot
 4      1081kB  106MB   105MB   ext3         untitled                   
 3      134MB   21.8GB  21.6GB  hfs+         Apple_HFS_Untitled_1       
 5      21.8GB  22.8GB  1069MB  linux-swap   swap                  swap
 6      22.8GB  60.0GB  37.2GB  ext3         untitled                   



Model: SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 2046MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      32.3kB  2046MB  2046MB  primary  fat32        boot


Error: Error opening /dev/md0: No such file or directory                 
Retry/Cancel? c                                                           

[root@arakus ~]#


Let's examine the above in detail. First, I moved from user mode symbolized by $ into root mode symbolized by #. I invoked the superuser command shorthand to allow me to have access to all commands regardless of their directory location; if I didn't do that I would have to go into each directory the specific program I want to use was actually installed into at the time YDL was installed. The shorthand is to use su followed by hyphen - or minus sign.

I invoke parted and use the l flag, that is the letter "l", as in the first character of the word letter, not the number 1 (one); doing this will force parted to list all the drives it sees as available and their precise location. The partition map above which parted prints clearly shows two drives, one at /dev/hda and the other at /dev/sda.
The /dev/sda device is a usb drive using the usb port. Your second drive will be seen similarly via the usb port or firewire port as a /dev/sda.

If OS X exists on that external drive it will be seen as hfs or hfs+ formatted partition just like /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda3. By now it should be a little clearer how YDL can see and extract the broadcom driver from OS X when OS X exists on the same hard drive as YDL. As your partition only has YDL and OS X doesn't exist anywhere, you can't extract the broadcom driver.

You would have to install OS X onto an external drive, you can use the instructions I provided earlier on how to use the Apple Install disk to format the external drive to make it into a complete Mac OS which the your computer can boot from. After this OS X installation process of the external drive is completed then you can use the instructions Billb provided earlier to extract the broadcom driver from it. You will have to, at that point, use the exact location that parted tells you the OS X drive is located at instead of the location provided in the instructions. For example instead of /dev/hda3 you would use something like /dev/sda4, whatever parted reports.

Farinet wrote:As mentioned before, it might be more reasonable to use the w-lan stick than the internal (original) airport because the latter very likely is defective, hardwarewise.

I'll try the way bill explained to deal locally with rpm packages and get back here after.

Thanks a lot for the moment to both of you!!!! :D


I think Bill's warning regarding his method needs to be understood. The software may be designed -- he and I have seen this in our independent and separate experiences before -- so that as the software is compiled the software tests that the compilation process is running on an Intel computer and tests for hardware components specifically unique to Intel and compatible architectures. When such tests occur the compilation process ends in failure because we are attempting to compile this software on a PowerPC computer. These compilation tests cannot be avoided as the software was designed to incorporate these tests. Unfortunately, you may not discover this requirement until you are in the middle of the compilation process. I wish I could say that such compilation problems are rare, but they are not.

I hope that you are successful in your efforts whichever path you choose to explore.

One more point, you cannot test whether Airport Extreme has a hardware problem because you didn't install OS X. You could test Airport Extreme from within YDL if you follow the first two steps of the link Bill provided for you which I'll repeat here.

If you can execute step 2, then there is nothing wrong with the installed Airport Extreme hardware.

Everything on the Earth has a purpose.
Every disease an herb to cure it.
And every person has a mission.
This is the Indian Theory of Existence.
-- Morning Dove, Salish (1888-1936)
User avatar
aguilarojo
ydl guru
ydl guru
 
Posts: 227
Joined: 06 May 2009, 14:50
Location: New York City

Re: Installation of YDL 6.2 to an external hd

Postby Farinet » 20 Oct 2010, 18:47

Thanks again to all you for your patience and interest. I resolved, but in a "dirty" way: I opted for Ubuntu 10.04 ppc and voilà, it worked (also because i'm a little bit more familiar with that linux flavour - not really, but a little bit).

Btw, to get the broadcom firmware even without an existing macos x i found and excellent instruction here:

http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras
Farinet
ydl newbie
ydl newbie
 
Posts: 7
Joined: 08 Oct 2010, 14:19


Return to Installation

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests

cron