Installing Gentoo on PowerMac 9600 problems - hwsetup fails

xav2075 · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2018 Posts: 1

Trying to install Gentoo Linux on this banger. Using bootX (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:PPC/Installation/Media#Alternative:_Booting_the_installation_CD_with_BootX) with the kernel and ram disk image files from install-powerpc-minimal-20140713.iso. One problem is where booting stalls on detecting the SCSI cd-rom a Matshita CR-8012 that otherwise works fine in Mac OS 9. I can get around this by plugging in a PCI IDE\SATA adapter and connect a IDE CD-ROM to that with the Gentoo minimal CD. Then boot continues until failing at hwsetup.

Any tips on how to get hwsetup to work so I can get stuck in and start installing Gentoo.

rbshep78 · n00b Joined: 26 Jan 2018 Posts: 8 Location: UK

Can you hook up the disc to another PPC machine? Then boot the CD , mac-fdisk partition / mkfs.ext4 and extract the stage3 tarball? And as a minimum, set a root password

You should be able to copy the kernel and initrd from the CD to your Mac OS partition and continue to use BootX, i've used the CD kernel / initrd with grub before.

I don't know the exact parameters you would need to specify the root device though - root=/dev/sdaX perhaps?