Unix on Mac?

Do you have access to a floppy and internet on these machines? You could probably make a boot floppy and do a bsd net install of the system.

Do you have access to a floppy and internet on these machines? You could probably make a boot floppy and do a bsd net install of the system.

http://netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html#boot-net

Which leads to this:

http://netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/intro.macppc.html

You'll need a PCI Macintosh with built-in Ethernet and a Unix/Linux/BSD/OS X/whatever server of running bootp/dhcpd, tftp, and NFS. If you have DSL or another always-up network you'll only need a NetBSD install miniroot on the server, as once booted the rest of the install can run over ftp directly from the internet.

Or if that's too much hassle, you can also boot off floppies and install over ftp. But netboot is *so* much sexier.

--Peace

I do have floppy drives and a broadband Internet connection. What I don't have is another machine running Unix. So I can't do the netboot thing just yet.

I've been snooping around the Debian site because it has instructions for a floppy/ftp install, but I can't find the actual floppy images. I haven't checked the NetBSD site for floppy images yet. I'll check there right now.

Yeah, it really depends on what Macs you plan to use for the project. As Eudi pointed out, a PCI Mac and up can netboot. If it's NuBus PPC it'll probably need BootX and a MacOS isntall to get booted. 68k Macs use Boot loaders and Mac OS, but there is the EMILE project to boot Linux w/o MacOS.

Okay, I'm checking out the NetBSD page and I'm reading all of the PPCMac stuff. I've found the two floppy images that I need, although I haven't yet downloaded them. I'll do that shortly.

My guinea pig machine is a PowerMac 7300/200 with 112MB of RAM and a one gigabyte hard drive.

Obviously, I'm Open Firmware version 1.0.5 and I've read that there is an issue with the 7300 that will require a patch.

So, the first step, I guess, is to partition my one gigabyte hard drive for this installation. I'm looking at five partitions: HFS+, A/UX Root, A/UX Swap, A/UX User, and A/UX Free. Any suggestions on how much of my one gigabyte drive should be allocated to each partition?

Note:

I have never installed Unix on a Macintosh in my entire life. This is totally new for me, so any and all help is humungously appreciated. Thanx.

Linky

You have studied the Install docs, right?

From the section on OF 1.0.5 and OF 2, Partitioning the HDD. Their links at the top of the page don't work right.

I'd recommend either a second HDD totally dedicated to UNIX, or just leaving MacOS off if possible.

Okay, I've created my boot floppies, I've changed the variables in Open Firmware so that startup halts at open firmware, I have partitioned my hard drive, and I have booted from the floppies.

I selected FTP Install and now I'm stuck with a screen that says:

To be able to use the network, we need answers to the following:

Your DNS domain:

I don't have DNS setup, so the documentation tells me to just press enter -- so I press enter.

Then I get this:

Your Host name:

I have no idea what I'm supposed to be entering here. The documentation tells me that I'll need IP addresses for the servers and all sorts of other stuff -- I can't find it.

I'm stuck! What do I do now? I have this network setup screen just sitting there mocking me. Help...

I've been successful on just a few 68000 machines...
But my first ftp install is in limbo... and I think its the scsi controller, or the way the drive is partitioned... installer is just not seeing the correct partition... it sees a smaller one.

Anyway... the ftp installer should give you an option for auto network configuration, then it uses dhcp to get you an ip address.

Good luck. (the only advice I get from the unix wizards is to RTFM)

http://netbsd.org/guide/download/netbsd-en.pdf.gz
http://netbsd.org/guide/en/

and by that they mean the guide...

Actually, I have read the guide. I've even read the FAQ and used Google to search for more guides.

i initially just hit the {Enter} key a few times and went with all of the default settings. That all seemed to work fine and I was prompted to select one of three available FTP sites (all three in Japan -- I'm in Canada) and given the forth choice of selecting "other".

No big deal, if FTP sites in Japan are the defaults, I'll go with them. Unfortunately, when my machine attempts to ping the server, it reports 100% packet loss; no connection is being established.

I remembered from the guide that I would need to use the IP address if I did not enter anything for DNS, so I did a manual DNS lookup for ftp.netbsd.org and entered the IP address. Still, I received a "Command Failed" message and was informed that my machine could not connect with the network or host. The preceding ping attempts reported 100% packet loss, but I proceeded to attempt a connection anyway. No go!

Now, I did read something about having to know the IP address of the closest router to the server. I could do a traceroute to get the IP address of the closest router, but I'm not sure where to enter that result in the NetBSD installer.

Oh yeah, what the heck IPv4 and IPv6? I've never heard of those in my entire life?

Thanks,

Willy

Okay, I figured it out. I did a manual network configuration. It still failed on the ping test and reported 100% packet loss but it was successful in connecting to the FTP server.

The installation has now received 5% of 'kern-GENERIC.tgz'.

Finally!

A lot of ISPs these days are blocking ICMP, and thus "ping". It's a pain in the @ss and breaks the Internet, but they think doing so make it harder for spammers, worms, and viruses to victimize their clueless customers.

Woot.

--Peace

IPv4 - an IP address in the form of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx is a number under 256.

IPv6 - an IP address in the form of yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy where y is a hexidecimal digit.

Simply put, v6 has a lot more namespace.

Thanks. I learn something new everyday.

Ditto to Eudimorphodon.

Yikes! This could take a couple of days to install. It's only received 8% of base.tgz and it's sucking it back at an abysmal 0.47KB/second with an estimated transfer time of just over ten and a half hours. Ouch! There's still other files to be transferred after this one too.

I was so gung ho about getting this installed and now there's nothing I can do but sit around and wait... and wait... and wait... yawn... and wait...

Think maybe it'll be installed by Saturday?

Regards,

Willy

It usually pays to poke around and find a faster mirror with NetBSD. The main US one in particular is often dreadful.

(Even then I usually end up fetching all the files with wget and sticking them on my local server the night before I ever actually want to install it.)

If you're lucky it'll speed up after-hours.

--Peace

That's one of the first tasks that I'm going to do with this machine: add more hard drives and store IRIX 6.5.x on it, so I can net install on my R5000 Indy. I've had the Indy kicking around for months and have yet to install an OS on it.

Although, I'm gonna need more RAM for the Indy if I'm hoping to use IRIX 6.5, as I've only 64MB in it right now. That should be sufficient for an install of 6.2 though.

I was thinking about installing something on one of my 68k Macs but I think I'll just stick with Mac OS for those machines. I can use a 68k Mac as a terminal for my Indy; it has no monitor.

Fun, fun, fun, till daddy takes the t-bird away...

Well, my little venture into doing an FTP install of NetBSD on a 7300/200 is still chugging along. At present, the 7300 has received 67% of comp.tgz with an estimated finishing time of four hours and 18 minutes.

There's been a slight improvement in transfer speed; I'm now getting a sustained transfer rate of 0.50KB/second or 512 Bytes/second. Although, I'll readily admit that my heart stops every time the word stalled flashes on my screen; this thing has already been running for more than a day and I'd hate to have to start all over again.

I'm beginning to feel like the people that have installed OS X on 68k machines. I hope this doesn't take seven days! Heck, God allegedly created the earth in only six days!

Well I have to agree that NetBSD is probably the best option. As far as I know it's the only distro that allows booting without a macos partition (although it is needed at first to set up the OpenFirmware properly). I've used it on quiet a few machines (Old and New world) and it works great. The installation process on OldWorld machine isn't that easy, but once you get it running it's rock solid! As for Netboot, I've never actually tried it. Why not go to a print shop and burn yourself a CD? They'll charge you like 5$ for it.

I'm thinking that I'd probably be better off to just buy myself a CD burner. I've seen them in local retail establishments for as little as twenty-something dollars.

I'm installing NetBSD 2.0.2 on an OldWorld 7300/200, and I didn't have too much trouble with the Open Firmware, it was actually the easiest part of the whole installation. I was having some trouble getting the installer to connect to the FTP site though. However, it was around 4:00am and I was really tired, so that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Nevertheless, after a few hours sleep, I sat down at the old 'puter and connected on the first go. All I have to do now is wait for everything to download from the FTP site.

Update

I saw a brief spike in transfer speeds as my transfer rate jumped to 1.48KB/second, that's about triple what I had been getting. The transfer rate has since fallen back to about 0.75KB/second, however.

Thus far, I've received 61% of games.tgz. I probably should have just opted for a base install, eh?

With NetBSD it's generally a good idea to install *everything* in the OS distribution if you have the disk space for it. If you find you need something from the original .tgz install sets later it's a huge pita to do it after the fact.

I know this is kind of late, but Mac Minix is really small and runs on top of the Mac OS (at least, really old Macs, like System 7 - System 7, 68k Machines). It is a little less than 6 Megabytes. It is way behind the times compared with the others, but it could be a good starting point…

here’s the link:
http://www.pliner.com/MacMinix/
and here’s the link that led me to the link:
http://logik.accesscard.org/setups.html