davjams blog

This one was a more complex installation than the previous 10..0 to 10.3 upgrade., partially because there were :

1. There were three 80GB drives installed with a wide variety of mount points;
2. The original root partition was on /dev/hda16, which is inaccessible using the libata driver;
3. Two of the drives were PATA, the third is a SATA device.

None of these were a real cause of problems, although having forgotten the root partition would be inaccessible did initially cause some extra work. If you're interested in what was needed for a successful upgrade, read on.

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Two reboots later, and the old SUSE 9.3 is replaced by openSUSE 10.3. One minor niggle just before the first reboot the system asked me to take out DVD two and insert DVD one. That didn't bother me. What did bother me was that when I chose to boot the installed system from the DVDs Grub menu, it auto-started Windows.

The end results were that I had to boot into Windows, shut down and reboot into Linux to complete stage two. Not a big problem, but it would have been nice to have not gone into Windows at all.

Now, back to the upgrade. Did it work? Well, for the most part, yes it did. (More)

Well, I'm still installing 10.3, and I've noticed one interesting feature I hadn't seen before. The installer installed a large number of packages from DVD one and then asked for DVD two. My system has two optical drives, a CD writer and  a DVD-RAM/DVD writer. All went well upto the point at which it wanted DVD two. YaST popped up the "Insert DVD two into drive" box and I pressed the eject button on the dialog box. (More)

Bolstered by the successful jump from SUSE 10.0 to openSUSE 10.3, I decided now would be a good time to upgrade one of my remaining SUSE 9.3 systems to openSUSE 10.3. As with the SUSE 10.0 system, there are several third-party packages installed, although not as many as were on the 10.0 system. (More)

Normally, when I perform such a version jump as this, I tend to do a fresh install. The reasons for doing so are that:

1. there are going to be large numbers of packages that don't come on the installation media, either because they're packages I've built and installed, or have come from places like Packman.
2. there are going to be large version jumps on some critical packages, eg. kernel, glibc.
3. there's the chance that some of the config files for some of the services have changed format, changed options, or something else that renders them unable to be used.
4. It's a good time to clear out all the older backups from previous minor upgrades.

In this case, and spurred on by someone else posting about how well their upgrade went (10.1->10.3 IIRC) that I decided to go for it.

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My last entry ended with me saying I was compiling xmms and xine. Well, both compiled, installed and work.

On the good side, xmms plays the mp3s without any hassle. The volume control on it doesn't work though. That doesn't worry me one little bit as I use kmix and turn down the sound using that. One other little thing I noticed is how much processor time is used by xmms while decoding mp3s. Almost all my mp3s are VBR and, in general, xmms uses about 5% of the processor time while playing back.

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I think I must be spoilt. After a few years of being able to add the Packman repository and easily add a wide variety of multimedia software, I that my poor Mac is s little left out.

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Well, I finally managed to sort out the problem of booting the iMac and having it start openSUSE. The solution? It was a partitioning problem, or an Open Firmware problem, not sure which.

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Well, I'm running openSUSE 10.3 on my iMac and, despite only having a 333MHz processor, it's still very useable.

Hardware wise, it's 384 MB of RAM, upgraded from the 64MB it originally came supplied with. The hard drive is a 160GB Excelstor device, and Linux is able to use the entire drive even though the hardware is supposedly limited to a 128GB. The display handles a maximum of 1024x768, and is able to run in 24bit mode. The sound system was picked up straight away, as was the network card.

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Well, after having a load of fun trying to get openSUSE onto my iMac, and not succeeding, I decided to try a different version. While I may not have gotten on with it on the x86 hardware, I thought that for testing purposes I'd try Debian.

So, to try install Debian, I downloaded the net-install CD image and burnt it to a rewritable CD, stuck it into the iMacs DVD drive and started it up.

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Not being satisfied with being beaten, I booted into the rescue system and reset the partitioning again. (More)

Well, this was a repeat of what happened in Getting openSUSE 10.3 onto an old iMac, part 4. The iMac shut down and restarted so as to continue with the second stage of the installation. However, as the system was restarting, the keyboard became completely unresponsive and the system froze again.

Luckily, I'd found out that all I needed to do was change the startup disc and could reboot into MacOS within a minute or two.

Not wanting to be beaten, I restarted the install the option from linuxrc to force YaST to use the text installer. This time I entered the following at the boot-prompt:

install textmode=1

This time, I skipped using the shell and had YaST start up in the familiar text mode.

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This is going to be done using the full release DVD. Downloading the PPC version of the 10.3 DVD, I discovered that, while the 32bit x86 DVD had over 6000 seeders and peers, the PPC DVD had less than 70.

Again, booting from the DVD got as far as probing the virtual terminal and starting YaST. At this point, it appeared as though the installation froze and required a power cycle to restart the system.

Well, it's not finished. It appears that due to the sheer number of downloads going on, one of the packages timed-out during the download and so my installation was only part way through when I checked it.

After a few more hours downloading and installing stuff, it finally got to the end. At this point it went through the process of installing the boot loader, and then started the countdown for a reboot.
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Not wanting to be beaten, I restarted the install and, after looking at the options available to pass to linuxrc, I added another option to the boot parameters to force YaST to use the text installer.

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After the previous installation failure, I decided to try using the full version of 10.3. While there is a single CD release for KDE and Gnome desktops available for the x86 based systems, these haven't been built for the PPC. Due to this, I ended up grabbing the mini ISO, burning it to disc and using that to perform a network install.
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As I had been unable to install on the Mac during the 10.3 testing cycle, I didn't have any full copies of the previous releases to build up the final release DVD. I did, however, have the single CD that I burnt from alpha 3 image and started using that to do do two things. The first was to actually test that I could boot using the DVD drive after performing the hardware mod described above, and the second was to perform a trial install, just to see what openSUSE Linux looks like on the iMac.
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