Install Linux on my Performa 6400

[jamie marchant]

I noticed that as well . Getting more RAM for my machine is going be tufough. To make it even harder a lot of places have reducusully high shipping fees when you try to ship the item to Canada. I am trying to mount my swap partion as early as possible but it's not working. Does anyone know of a fairly modern Linux OS that runs on a Mac with little Ram. Are there things I can turn off in OS 8.6 that will give Linux more memory. Would it help if I booted off of the Disk Tools disk?

 

[beachycove]

Where are you, exactly?

 

[jamie marchant]

I live in the Greater Toronto Area which is in the province of Ontario, Canada. I have added this information to my profile.

 

[ChristTrekker]

I've run X in a lot less than 48MB RAM before. Sure, you're not going to run any modern web browser in 48MB RAM, nor would you want to on that old a machine anyway, but still.

 

[jamie marchant]

What distro did you use? How did you launch the Linux install process? btw the net install I am using is GUI-less. Where they any settings that you had to set in Mac OS?

 

[jamie marchant]

So last night I tried booting off of the "Disk Tools PPC" disk since it takes less ram but it did not help. However I have heard of people installing Linux on machines with 32 MB of ram, so I wonder why it's not working.

 

[TylerEss]

I ran YDL Champion Server on my PowerBook 5300 with 24MB RAM, but 24MB RAM was a lot more back then than it is now.

Is there documentation as to the size of the ramdisk that comes on your install CD? Alternately, can you mount you install CD in another linux box and unpack the compressed .cpio archive to see how big it really is?

I suspect the ramdisk and kernel are just piggy and won't fit in 48MB.

 

[jamie marchant]

Ok I will take a look at this latter on.

 

[jamie marchant]

Hmm I can't find the .cpio archive but the ram-disk file is only 4 MB compressed so at 50% compression it would only be 8 MB.

 

[jamie marchant]

Well reading the documentation I found there is a kernal aurument"lowmem=2" and that got me past my sticking point in the install. Now I need to find and load the correct drivers for my Nic card.

 

[jamie marchant]

I got it installed but now I can't boot the newer installed system .

kernel panic not syncing VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (3,6)

My BootX setting can be seen in this pic:




Any suggestions would be aprshated

 

[theos911]

That means your root=/dev/xxx is not pointing to the correct partition. Start with the # at 1 and go up from there. You should eventually hit the right partition. (Or give it the device you selected as root during installation)

 

[jamie marchant]

Actually I thought that what that meant but I was parity sure that hda6 is my root. I will try the others just in case, is there anything else wrong with my boot options.

 

[jamie marchant]

None of them worked . But earler I used the installer as a rescues disk and saw that hda6 is the root from there. The system seems to be intact as well.

 

[jamie marchant]

I tried renaming the image to "INITRD.GZ" but that did not work eaitehr.

 

[theos911]

Your other options look fine. Depending on the nature of your installation you may need hda, sda, sdb and so on. I can't really tell from my end.

 

[jamie marchant]

Good thinking I give sda, a try but it should be hda for before the panic it lits all the drive it knows about and there are only two a floppy(fd0) and a hard drive(hd0). Off-topic but that's actually a bad thing for wher'd my CD go?

EDIT: SDA does not work. I am going to double check that I am useing the correct arguments.

 

[jamie marchant]

I tried lots of combinations of arguments listed here: http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt, but no luck...

 

[jamie marchant]

Well I found out I was trying too boot the wrong RAM disk, what I was trying too boot was a symbolic link. Unfrochently I get less far with a the real ram disk my computer freezes for about three minutes at 3 "console [tty0] enabled boot console disabled". I imaging something note too good is happening behind the scenes. Any suggestions.

 

[jamie marchant]

I added the kernel argument console=/dev/tty1. Unfrochently then it died unpacking the intitramdisk ... due too not enough memory. Anyone know of a distro that takes less memory?