On Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 08:46:17AM -0500, dark3lf wrote:
> Any suggestions?  Do us mac68k users need to upgrade, are there any real
> advantages over 1.4.1?  Speed increaces, etc...  Also, if I do upgrade,
> would I just replace the kernel, or would I have to replace the entire base
> system files?

I just did this last night on one machine and am doing it as I type on
another. No ill effects, no drastic speed/stability gains that I can
see (but there were no speed/stability problems with 1.4.2_ALPHA, so
that doesn't mean much). I haven't done a lot of testing, right now
the machine just needs to sit stupidly and run a few pvmd3s. (When I
get around to it, it needs to cooperate with glunix too.)

You have two options. Download the packages on the Mac OS side, use
the installer to slurp them in, go ahead and boot up. One caveat (that
goes for the below too): DO NOT INSTALL etc.tgz. You do *not* want to
write over *anything* in /etc. If you want copies of the new files
(and from my cursory examination, nothing important has changed,
YMMV), untar them by hand, as someone other than root, from somewhere
other than /, and cp them in by hand.

On the other hand if, like me, you don't have room on the Mac OS side
for the tarballs, go the scary way.

Just boot in single user (it's an option in the Mac OS-side booter),
ifconfig your interface up (probably need to add the default route
too), mount -u /dev/sdXq / (your root device), mount /dev/sdYr /usr
(your usr device, if it's different), cd /, ftp the packages, and use
pax (or, I guess, tar, but pax is cooler, IMHO, and it's all that
exists on boot floppies for macppc and sparc, so...)

You'll want something like:

  # for i in `ls *.tgz` ; do echo ${i} ; pax -rvz -pe -f ${i} ; done

The for statement is pretty self-evident if you know sh syntax. The
flags to pax are: -r, read (from an archive, will write the files
out); -v, verbose; -z, process input through gzip; -p <n>, preserve
<n>; e, the <n> (e means everything - all of the ownership and
permission flags for the files); -f <filename>, archive file to read.

Remeber the etc caveat! Don't download it at all, or at least, don't
put it at /.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net