How To Install Mk Linux

MkLinux Installation Notes Please remember that this is a work in progress. Updates and news are available at our web site: www.mklinux.apple.com. You are strongly encouraged to check the web site for notes, bug fixes, updates, etc BEFORE you begin the installation process. To install MkLinux on a Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, 8100, PowerComputing 100, or 120 (other Nubus based PowerPC systems may work but we haven't tested on any other systems yet ... check the web site for updates) you must have at least 16 meg of RAM in your computer and 400 MB of disk available. MkLinux uses its own filesystem format and your disk must be partitioned properly in order to install and use MkLinux. Unfortunately, for this developer release, this is a manual process that must be performed before you begin the actual installation. The process you will use to create the disk partitions varies among the drive utilities. We are using the same basic partitioning structure that was used for Apple's A/UX product so most utilities should support setting up the partitions. The 2 most important partitions are the swap partition and the root partition—you cannot run MkLinux without these. The swap partition (usually at least 32MB, but no larger than 64MB) will be used for virtual memory backing store. The 'root' partition holds the core of the MkLinux system utilities, drivers, etc.—it must be at least 100MB (the minimum is 300MB if you choose not to have a separate 'usr' partition). It is also common to have a 'usr' partition (200MB minimum recommendation) to separate the most dynamic portion of the filesystem from the core of the OS. Creating the partitions in preparation for installing MkLinux will require your becoming intimately familiar with your favorite drive setup utility. You may want to use HD SC Setup which came with your Macintosh (and which we've included on the CD). No matter which utility you use, you will to go into the partition setup portion of the utility— and, more importantly, you will probably need to use the more advanced or custom modes of partitioning available. We hope to simplify this process in a future release of MkLinux. Existing Macintosh drives usually come pre-configured such that the entire drive is taken up with 1 or more Macintosh filesystems (HFS). You will need to save off any data you may have on the drive you plan to install onto before changing the partitioning of the drive. The first step is making sure there is sufficient free space available on the drive. This does not mean free space as listed in the finder window but, rather, space that is not assigned for use by any filesystem such as HFS. You may have to shrink or delete the existing Macintosh fileystem(s) before you proceed. Remember you need about 400MB of otherwise unassigned drive space. Once the space is available it will need to be allocated in approximately this structure: +-----------------+ | Partition Map | +-----------------+ | Driver | +----------------…