Linux on PowerPC FAQ-O-Matic : Start Here! (Getting started/First day) :
Installing on 7100/80av
The intent of the following is to spare some poor soul from going through the same agony.
1. The one thing that saved my butt was that I had a SCSI zip drive connected to my Mac. I copied over the System folder, the disk utilities and a copy of Navigator. I highly recommend having a bootable system on something other than the drive you are going to partition.
2. The version of Drive Setup in the DR3 distribution is old. Get the 1.6.1 from Apple.
3. The Mach Kernel in the DR3 distribution is also old. When trying to use it I got the error on trying to install that indicates mklinux may not recognize your drive. There is a newer Mach Kernel date march 9 1999 at: ftp://ftp.mklinux.apple.com/pub/contrib/kernels/stable/ get this and replace the one given in the DR3 distribution. BTW after unzipping make sure you change the name to Mach Kernel (not Mach_Kernel).
4. I highly recommend playing around with pdisk before doing the install but don't use it to set up your partitions until after you have used Drive Setup 1.6.1 to update your drivers. I did not follow this path and after using pdisk (apparently succesfully ) my mac would boot to the point of just about showing the desktop - then it would power off. I ended up opening my mac case and pulling the power plug on my SCSI drive. Then I booted again withe the Zip drive in place. Then I used the "Startup Drive" control panel to select my Zip drive as the startup drive. Then I shutdown my Mac, reconnected the power plug and was able to continue.
Before messing with your partitions make sure you have an alternate boot device. Set it as the startup device and when you want to boot from you main system just pop the alternate boot device (CD or ZIP) out and you'll be able to boot from a known good disk by inserting the CD or ZIP just after you power on.
5. I ended up using Drive Setup to make my partitions. Then at the appropriate point in the install it gives you pdisk (hence the admonition to play around with it) to set up your AUX partitions. I just deleted my newly created HFS partitions and then recreated them as AUX partitions. No trouble (by then anyway).
HTH
brett@knightsofthenet.com
The machine locks up during installation of R5 Beta on a non-blue PowerMac G3