Yellow Dog Linux On a Firewire Drive
I installed Yellow Dog on a Lombard a little while back, and found a cool HOWTO on migrating the
Linux install to a firewire drive. I need to have Linux with me on the next
trip I take, and I need PC Card support, so Virtual PC was out, and I
didn’t want to take two laptops. The only problem is I’m a cheap
bastard, and the $25 Firewire PC Card I put in the Lombard is
mega-crap.
So, I took my FireWire drive out of its case, put it in the Lombard, and
installed YDL (I skipped the X configuration) on it this morning, and
then followed the instructions on that page starting from Step 3
(Modifying the initrd & booting Linux), and changing the filenames to
reflect my configuration. After I was done, it wouldn’t boot on the
Lombard any more (no surprise there), but I put it back in the Firewire case, and it boots
up into Linux fine on my 15″ (I didn’t need to do the open firmware
stuff in Step 3m, but held down Option when I botoed and selected the
drive).
After I bootd for the first time, it went through a lot of
hardware detection, and I had to reconfigure X by running Xautoconfig4,
and then editing /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to specify the fbdev driver. Then
I logged in as me, ran startx, and all was well.
one that YDL set up, be sure to change the boot= entry to point at
a partition on the sda drive, rather than the hda drive. I forgot this,
and almost trashed my Mac OS X install with the ybin command; it was
pointing at hda9 (the bootstrap partition when it was in the Lombard) instead
of sda9 (the new device name as a firewire drive). Turns out that hda9
is the partition on the internal drive where Mac OS X is installed.
It’s safe to say you don’t want any references to hda in your
/etc/directory after you go external!