OldWorld Mac G3 won't boot liveCD

[tandj]

My system is a Mac 7300 with a G3 upgrade card, 350Meg RAM, some scsi disks, and two cdroms (internal and external).

I d/l'd the liveCD from the 2004.0 folder, checked md5, and burned it successfully. (Did this on my G4 system) Copied initrd.img.gz to the system folder, and G4 kernel to Linux Kernels folder, which is also in the system folder. Using BootX (both App and extension on startup) I checked ramdisk box and selected the initrd.img.gz file; selected kernel G4; set size=32000; set kernel option field to: init=/linuxrc.

try 1. screen goes black, gives some linux messages, pauses, goes black, and nothing happens until restart 3 minutes later.

try 2. check no video driver box: same as try 1 except rather thanblack screen at end, Tux shows up at top left corner, after a delay, the cdrom drive is accessed for a bit, but no messages show. Restart after 3 minutes.

try 3: repeat try 1, but use files from the 2004.1 d/l: when the black screen shows up, Tux image is messed up (color wrong; image fractured), but messages roll out about loading drivers and such. Finds ramdisk. Seems like a boot in progress. Message about looking for live environment is followed by list of two cdroms, delay, and then the cdrom with the liveCD is accessed for a while. then kernel panic w/ following messages:

Trying to move old root to /initrd ... failed
Unmounting old root
Trying to free ramdisk memory ... okay
mount_devfs_fs(): unable to mount devfs, err: -2
freeing unusedl kernel memory 160k init 4k chrp 8k prep
Warning: unable to open an initial console
kernel panic: no init found. try passing init= option to kernel
<0> Rebooting in 180 sec ...

Which it does. I tried several variations. like booting the 2004.1 files with no video driver, but nothing appears to work for my setup. Also, I have Yellow Dog on a disk, and the installer was trying to use that instead of the cdrom, so I turned off the disk to force it to select the CD. I think that's all the info I have.

I'd appreciate some suggestions of what to try next. I'd kind of like to give gentoo a try.

thanks.

[vitec]

I cannot boot it either. I only have 32Mb of RAM, do you know anything about minimum memory allowed? Have you managed to solve your problem? I really need to use my 40GB disk on my iMac for ftp purposes but I am pissed off with Gentoo right now! Every other distro works fine, Yellow Dog 3.0, Mandrake 9.1, LinuxPPC the problem is I hate all the other distros once installed!

vitec
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vitec

[tandj]

Yes, I finally got it to boot. My problem was I burned the iso onto a cd-rw, and my old mac cdrom would not read a cd-rw. After I burned it onto a cd-r -- and I set the speed to 1x just to play it safe -- it booted fine.

If you have an iMac, I think that is new world, so my experience may not be much help. New world macs use yaboot, and I'm using BootX. I don't know what you use in yaboot, but the kernel parameters I used with BootX were:
specified G4 kernel
selected the initrd file from the /boot diretory where the kernels live
root=/dev/ram0
init=/linuxrc
cdroot

I'm still struggling though. Finally got a kernel built -- actually, I've gotten a LOT of kernels built -- but none that work. I saw someone say 2004.1 doesn't work with old world macs, so I think I'm going to try 2004.0 tomorrow and see if I can get a working kernel out of that. If not, I'll probably quit. gentoo sounds like a great distro, but after several weeks and a lot of hours working on it, I'm starting to think that -- for me at least -- the "too" stands for too tough, too time-consuming, too much. Hopefully you'll get yours going soon. Hopefully I'll get it going --um -- too.

Good luck vitec.

tony

[tandj]

Ack! Sorry, I forgot to respond to the memory question. The install manual says you need at least 1G free disk space, and, if you don't use prebuilt packages, 300 meg of memory (RAM+swap). 32MB is not much memory. Was that a typo? Anyway, the best thing you can do for performance in any system is add RAM.

Regards,
tony

[vitec]

No, I actually only have 32Mb of RAM since here in Portugal it's kind of hard to see a Apple Store or something like that, and let's face it 2'' SDRAM is not the thing you see the most this days. Well, anyway, it's true that mine is a newworld since Yellowdog Linux boots right from yaboot into a wonderfull black and white bash but since I use gentoo on my AMD I'm really used to have everything compiled for my pc. The problem is that gentoo on the mac is probably the worst thing I have ever seen! Thanks for you help anyway. Oh, and I cannot boot the 2004.1 live cd from bootx neither. The problem is that the only working OS I have for this sucker is the one that came with it. MACOS 8.5. And that's really bad. I never even set my eyes on a 9 series or X series. Yellow dog, Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat, LinuxPPC have all been installed on my mac but they are just to damn heavy. Guess I need to go fetch some RAM.
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vitec

[tandj]

I hear you loud and clear about the RAM. Still, more is better if you can swing it.

At the risk of wandering away from gentoo, you should upgrade your mac os8.5 to 8.6. There is a free upgrade at apple.com, and it fixes a number of problems that 8.5 had.