On Sun, 12 Apr 1998, Bob Nestor wrote:

> David A. Gatwood <marsmail@globegate.utm.edu> wrote:
> 
> >So how exactly do they get away with distributing the Mach Kernel,
> >precompiled, with that in there?  It can definitely read from HFS
> >partitions, since the pre-DR3 installer boots off of an HFS partition
> >(i.e. the mach_servers, bootstrap.conf... stuff that'd normally be on
> >the MkLinux partition is on an HFS partition for the installer).
> 
> >From the "How to Install MkLinux" DR2.1 Release:

<snip>

Yeah, the DR2.1 does things a lot like NetBSD does, with the fs creation
on the MacOS side.  pre-DR3 (which supports a whole lot of systems that
DR2.1 didn't, like the G3 :-)  doesn't do any of that.  Instead, it uses
the RedHat installer.  You create the basic partitions on the MacOS side,
generally (often with the MacOS version of pdisk) but don't actually do
anything with them. The basic install procedure is:


1.  download the mach_servers directory and place it on your HFS partition
of your hard drive
2.  insert the MkLinux Booter and Mach Kernel into your extensions folder
3.  run the MkLinux control panel to set the root device to point to your
HFS partition.
4.  reboot into the RedHat installer (thus the Mach Kernel loads the
vmlinux server and default_pager directly off the HFS partition).
5.  Answer its questions.
6.  it will modify your HFS partition's lilo.conf using vmlinux's built-in
HFS support (not the Mach Kernel support, which is read-only).  It then
reboots.
7.  Boot into MkLinux and have fun playing


In reality, things get kind of convoluted, as many pieces of the equation
don't work 100% reliably yet, like that write to lilo.conf, and problems
booting off some IDE drives, and the problems with HFS+....



> However "pdisk" does give the user
> the option of re-writing the Partition Map with the warning that the disk
> will not be usable with MacOS after doing so.

It's quite safe to rewrite the partition map as long as you don't modify
the location or sizes of the HFS partitions.  Or do you mean to initialize
the partition map?


David

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