Continued from yestereday's Preparing Your
Low-End Mac for Linux.
Resources
With Iridium finally ready for Linux, I could move on to the actual
installation process. Before you start this stage, it's important that
you read up on how the installation process works. There's quite a bit
of information available, both as text files on the Debian CDs and from
Debian's Internet site. When
looking up this material, it's important to remember that Linux runs on
several different platforms; you need to make sure you get the right
guides for the Mac.
Another excellent resource for the low-end Mac Unix user (and indeed
for almost anything related to older Macs) is Jag's House, which has links to a wide
variety of Unix information.
One guide that stood out to me
was SE/30
Debian Install. Potato, Kernel 2.2.19, Penguin 17, which not only
walks you through the installation process, but also targeted the very
Mac I was using! This particular guide is a handy thing to read even if
you're not using an SE/30,
but remember that it, like many others, was written as an unofficial
spare time project and isn't always clear-cut.
One guide that is written as a full time professional project is
Learning
Debian GNU/Linux from the respected computer publishing house
O'Reilly Associates. This book, weighing in at 360 pages, will not only
help you install Debian, but also act as a useful guide and reference
as you explore your machine's capabilities. The only downside is that
the book isn't targeted specifically to running Debian on a Mac, rather
concentrating on Debian in general. Still, it's hard to complain when
you consider that O'Reilly makes an electronic version available
completely free of charge on their Internet site.
It's also a good idea to choose one or two documents that you think
will prove the most helpful during the installation process and print
them out so you have them on hand in permanent, write-all-over form
should they be needed.
My efforts to get Debian Linux running on my trusty old box ran into
one final wrinkle - the Linux kernel that came on my CD is an older
version (2.2.10) which does not support the SE/30. The Linux kernel is
the very core of the operating system, and if it won't work on your
Mac, your Linux adventures will grind to a halt. On the official
CD-ROM, the kernel you'll be using lives in the :install:mac folder in
a file simply titled "linux".
The solution to this problem - as documented in the aforementioned
SE/30 Debian Install guide - is to copy much of this :install:mac
folder to your hard disk's Mac OS partition. Once there, you can
download a newer kernel (version 2.2.19) from the address given in the
guide and add it to your copy of the folder in place of the original
linux file.
When it comes to working out what kernel version your machine needs,
you may have to look around for the information. There may be something
floating around on the net telling at what version support for the
various Mac models was added to the kernel, but if it exists, I don't
know where. Once again, the key seems to be experimentation. Try
initialising the installation process using the kernel from the CD and
see what happens. You'll know if the kernel proves incompatible with
your machine as the Mac will almost certainly lock solid as soon as the
Penguin loader tries boot up your Linux session.
Even if the kernel you have is compatible with your Mac, it might be
a good idea to grab a newer one anyway as the stability and feature set
of the kernel improves with each new release. If you do take this
approach however, bear in mind that your Mac OS partition must be large
enough to accommodate these extra files.
Installing Linux
After the effort of getting Iridium ready for action, running the
actual installation itself was almost relaxing by comparison. The
Penguin loader, once its basic configuration was complete, flawlessly
launched my newly downloaded Linux kernel, after which the installation
program starts up automatically.
Debian's installer is a text based system, navigated by cycling
through the various options with a combination of the tab, arrow, and
enter keys. Though this system lacks the intuitiveness of the mouse
driven systems with which Mac users are familiar, one can get the hang
of it after a few minutes use.
It does remain clumsy in places and has one or two tricks up its
sleeves. Of these, the one you're most likely to notice, is the fact
that it hasn't quite got the hang of screen redraws, so an old dialogue
from several steps back can suddenly reappear in front of you. These
"ghost" dialogues are just that and will remain unresponsive to your
attempts to use them. They don't actually harm anything, just cause a
little confusion until they disappear to make way for the next "real"
dialogue.
Looking at the installer, however, you can get the impression that
it's somewhat of an "unfinished" work designed to be the bare minimum
necessary to get the job done with little concession to aesthetic
niceties. This is likely due in no small part to the fact that Unix has
largely been the preserve of the techie crowd, who remain comfortable
with these sometimes complicated procedures. Those who wrote the
installer probably only tested it's functionality among themselves,
giving little thought that others - particularly those whose computing
background rests largely on consumer OSes like the Mac OS or Windows -
may have difficulty coming to grips with it's idiosyncrasies. If they
did, they were likely willing to accept such a concession in return for
both the monetary and creative freedom of such an Open Source
project.
Even after you've got the hang of the installer's navigation, you
should still be on the lookout for any attempts it may make to stymie
your progress by throwing up questions which are either difficult to
understand or whose answers aren't always what you might expect. Should
this happen, your best course of action is to refer to one or two of
the installation guides you hopefully have at the ready and research
that particular step thoroughly before answering anything.
The last step, and one of the somewhat more enjoyable steps, of the
process is to select which of the optional software or packages you
want to install on your Mac. This step comes in two flavours. First is
advanced, which perhaps you should avoid unless you like the
idea of sifting though a list of thousands of packages - often with
little clear indication of what each one does or whether you need it.
Second comes simple. which reduces the process into selecting
from a list of fifteen or so tasks you may want to do with your
Mac.
Once I had Iridium up and running with Linux, I planned to test it
out on some light Internet duties and C programming, so among the tasks
I chose were "Dialup Internet" and "C Development." Later on, I might
want to play around with networking the old SE/30 to a PC, so I added
the Samba toolkit that will allow my Mac to talk to a Windows box just
as if it were another Windows PC.
As an experiment in low-end masochism I threw in the X-Windows
system, as well as a few text-based games to while away those
in-between moments of productivity.
Having completed this last step and allowed the Mac to scan all
three of the CDs for the packages it needed to install for my chosen
tasks, I then left it in peace to get on with the process of trickling
all that data from the CD to its hard disk.
I knew this process would take time, Jag (the maintainer of Jag's
House) mentions on his site that it took 16 hours for his SE/30 to
install Linux from a 2x CD-ROM.
It was just after 7 p.m. on a Monday when my own Mac slowly began
sucking the packages one by one from the CD. This continued throughout
the evening, generally without any intervention on my part, although it
did ask the occasional question, forcing me to check up on it every now
and then.
I went to sleep that night to the muffled sound of Iridium's fan
from the other room, and when I woke at 6 a.m. the next morning to go
to work, the packages were still copying across, the old Mac having
soldiered on all through the night.
Leaving it to do it's thing throughout the workday, I expected it to
be waiting for me to change the CD once I got home at 5 p.m., but it
was still going. It was at this point that I began to think that not
using that 12x CD-ROM wasn't exactly a bright idea.
It wasn't until 6:55 p.m. - just short of 24 hours after the
packages started copying - that the Mac finally prompted for the second
CD. Unfortunately, while the first CD went by with little intervention
on my part, the second CD was much more talkative, with various
Internet tools and the Samba networking suite all lining up to ask me
something. It was still working away at 11 p.m., so I spent another
night lulled by the muted hum of an SE/30 cooling fan.
At 6 a.m. next morning I awoke to find a problem I expected to run
into had in fact occurred - sometime during the night the Mac wanted to
know the details of my Internet provider and, while I slept, had sat
idle waiting for them. Giving it the required information got things
moving again, but at the cost of several hours.
I came home to the same thing, gave Iridium the answers it wanted
this time - "Some packages have failed to reinstall properly, would you
like to reinstall them now [Y/n]?" - and left it to do it's thing.
Finally, at just after 7 p.m. on Wednesday, I was greeted with the
words, "Have fun. You can either log in as root or adam now...." A
touch of the enter key cleared the screen and then, at 7:10 p.m. -
fully 48 hours after I first left the Mac to stream the data across
from the first CD - I finally saw the words:
Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 iridium tty1
iridium login:
Lessons Learned
Of the 48 hours that passed during the Great Linux Package Install,
I'd estimate that around 40 consisted of the actual installation, with
the Mac spending the other 8 or so waiting around for me to answer some
question or other. Upgrading Iridium's hard disk, preparing the
software and running through the interactive stages of the installation
probably chewed up an additional 3 hours, making for a total of 51.
While those first three hours were inevitable, you probably won't be
too anxious to spend two entire days having your Mac thrash it's hard
disk while you check in on it every there and then. Unfortunately, if
you're planning to drag out an old SE/30, IIcx, or similar machine for your Unix box, you
are basically asking for such a wait, but there are some things you can
do to push it along.
First, and most obviously if you're installing from CD, is the
CD-ROM drive. As I said, by the installathon's 24th hour, I was
beginning to regret my decision to stick by my 2x drive in favour of
borrowing my Power Mac's 12x CD-ROM. The faster drive would obviously
be a great help, but it isn't everything - though the 12x unit is six
times faster than my old 2x Apple CD300, an installation using it would
not have passed by in one-sixth of the time.
On top of the fact that the old SCSI bus of an SE/30 can only go so
fast, the actual transfer of data to the hard disk is only part of the
process. The packages are stored on the CD in compressed form and must
be expanded back into their original uncompressed selves. How quickly
this occurs depends on just how much power your Mac has lurking under
the hood, and, as anyone who has unstuffed a large .sit archive on an
SE/30 can tell you, file decompression on a 16 MHz '030 doesn't exactly
flash by fast enough to make your head spin.
While there is little you can do to speed up your Mac's processor
short of taking to the machine with a soldering iron or trading the
whole thing in for something a little zipper, file compression - like
most tasks - can benefit from a larger helping of RAM. As your
machine's RAM provides the work area in which the files are actually
decompressed, it follows that the more there is to work in, the more
the machine can do in a given time - especially as it can make fewer
reads of the CD and hard drives. Also, once you do have your chosen
flavour of Unix running, your RAM upgrade will stand you in good stead
as some Unix apps, most notoriously the X-Windowing system, have a
voracious and sometimes downright frightening appetite for memory.
Naturally, you can't just dump a fast CD ROM and some extra RAM into
your battered old SE/30 and expect it to scream through an
everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Unix install within minutes. What you
will get, however, is a useful increase in speed and capability - both
during the install and later on when everything's up and running,
So when all's said and done, I'm now the proud owner of my first
non-Intel Unix box. What I'll do with it now is still up in the air,
but I do want to see how useful it is, and I'll be mentioning it's
progress here in addition to that of some faster companion Macs I'm
setting up alongside it.
It seems almost comical to have spent over 48 hours
installing Debian onto the SE/30 when the PC I'm typing this on (a 200
MHz Pentium Pro with 64 MB RAM) could blow through a far larger
installation in as many minutes, but no Intel Unix installation was
quite this interesting, and the end result sure as hell never looked so
good. 
