[gentoo-dev] Gentoo PPC Linux

[Brian Ellis]

Greetings!  I've been trying since last night to get Gentoo Linux 
running on my G4 tower, without much luck.  All I managed to do was 
render my system unbootable for an hour or two, and I think it's mostly 
because the instructions I was following 
(http://www.gentoo.org/doc/gentoo-ppc-install.html) lost me at a 
particular point.
Everything was just fine until I got around to editing /etc/fstab.  
Now, I'm a programmer and I use Mac OS X, so while I'm not exactly a 
Unix geek I can grep myself out of a wet paper bag if absolutely 
necessary.  However, I was completely waylaid by the difference between 
my /etc/fstab file and the sample one in the instructions.  While that 
one looks like this:

/dev/ROOT           /           ext3	 noatime         0 1
/dev/SWAP           none        swap	 sw              0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0  /mnt/cdrom  iso9660	 noauto,ro       0 0
proc                /proc       proc	 defaults        0 0

the one I actually had looked more like this (I'm reproducing this from 
memory):

/dev/ROOT           /           ???      noatime         0 0
/dev/BOOT			/boot		ext2	 atime           1 1
/dev/SWAP           none        swap	 sw              0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0  /mnt/cdrom  iso9660	 noauto,ro       0 0
proc                /proc       proc	 defaults        0 0

I don't remember what the "???" was, but it definitely wasn't ext2 or 
ext3 (I'm using ext2)...  I seem to remember thinking it implied being 
some sort of default Linux file system, but I don't know why I got that 
impression.  Anyway, you probably know.  :)
At any rate, being entirely unsure about how to handle this problem, 
but realizing that my root and boot partitions would be the same (hda3) 
and noting in the instructions that I was not to put my bootstrap 
partition in, I changed my fstab to this:

/dev/hda3           /           ext2	 noatime         0 1
/dev/hda4           none        swap	 sw              0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0  /mnt/cdrom  iso9660	 noauto,ro       0 0
proc                /proc       proc	 defaults        0 0

I then merrily went along with the install until I got to the yaboot 
configuration, where I hit another snag: I have two hard drives.  The 
Linux partitions were going on hda, and my Mac OS X partition is all by 
itself on hdb.  Unfortunately, `ls /dev/hdb*' gave me something like 14 
possibilities (hdb1..hdb14), and I had absolutely no clue which 
partition was which.  I tried hdb1 (wishful thinking, I guess) and hdb9 
(because under Mac OS X it's disk1s9), but not only did neither of 
those work but apparently my fstab was wrong too, because after the 
'boot:' prompt and the "loading kernel..." message, I got an error that 
there was no such file/directory.  To make matters even worse, my 
monitor is a Sun connected using an adaptor, and for some reason Mac OS 
X makes it like to go to sleep at startup until fairly late in the boot 
process...  unfortunately, yaboot doesn't seem to trigger it to wake up 
(although the Gentoo CD does), so ideally I'd like to not use it at all 
and just use BootX instead.  Is there any way to accomplish all this?  
In a word, "Help!"  :)

Any information you can provide would be *most* welcome.  Thanks!

Brian Ellis

P.S.:  If I've left out any technical details you need, please let me 
know, but as I nuked the entire Linux hard drive after the last install 
failed, I can more or less set it up however you need for your 
information to work correctly.

P.P.S.:  There doesn't seem to be a folder with yaboot examples 
anywhere in the install, despite what the instruction said, and man 
yaboot is about as helpful as the average man page is...  which is to 
say not very if you don't already know what you're doing.  :/

P.P.P.S.:  I'm sorry if this isn't the right address to send this to; I 
just clicked the link at the bottom of the page.  :)