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Attempts to install Linux in multi-boot on a 2004 12" Alubook

Alubook133

Alubook133

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 12, 2024
111
48
Southern France
It essentially started here (and few posts thereafter). Despite the lack of Airport chip support/firmware, getting a modern OS to run on my machine beside the good old OS X is certainly worth the effort (not to mention all the great work done by the Adélie team to support the PPC32 arch., would be a pity to ignore it).

So I've picked this Adélie Linux+KDE 1.0 beta 5 ISO from here, am able to run it in Live mode, now wanting to install it on my Alubook. Therefore this thread, which - if everything goes well enough - will eventually touch on other aspects (apps, firmware/drivers, ...) once install has been successful.

Here's a nice tutorial from @Doq on how to install this distro on an _empty_ drive, however having already installed Tiger and Sorbet Leopard I want to multi-boot Adélie iow without wiping the disk first.
I've looked into this clip :


but want to make sure I'm not going to erase existing volumes/partitions.
Here's some info on current partitioning: (the "Linux" volume is essentially empty for now, this is where I plan to install Adélie)

Logged on Sorbet Leopard :

diskutil-list.png


Running from the Live Adélie DVD :

mac-fdisk_p.png


lsblk.png


So... how to make sure I keep the Tiger, Sorbet and Documents volumes intact, while getting Adélie (and grub) installed...?

Thanks very much for the help, and let me know if you need any additional info. :)
 
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Okay, for your specific case, consider the following:

Code: 
## Mac OS Disk Utility creates 128MB gaps in volumes that are free.
## We can leverage this to sneak our bootstrap partition into the first free space:
C
2p
100M
Apple_Bootstrap

## Your allocated Adelie volume is sda7. Delete it so we can create Linux volumes here.
## (diskutil and mac-fdisk/linux will show the layout identically, thus sda7 = disk0s7)
d
7

## create swap space (size can be adjusted)
c
7p
1G
swap

## create root part
c
8p
8p
root

## write and quit
w
y
q
 
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Thanxx a bunch !

I didn't pay attention to this before but you're right there are 3 "extra partitions" created by the Apple Disk utilitity, each of size 128MB (here sda2, 4 and 8) that are deemed "free space", so I guess one may use them as one likes.

A couple of questions, just to make sure :
- there's a mix of upper case C and lower case c, I know they have slightly diff meanings in mac-fdisk, so is that intentional ?

- from what I've seen in the video clip posted above the guy uses 3 partitions (sda8, 9 and 10), shouldn't swap and root be in different partitions ? In particular when in the Horizon installer using a custom partition setup how will I be able to separately define swap vs root if both reside in sda7 ?

In fact in your own tutorial you do create 3 separate partitions, followed with :

Code: 
# mkfs.hfs /dev/sda2
# mkswap /dev/sda3
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4

which I'll also have to exec (with the proper part # of course) prior to launching horizon-ui, or ?
 
Alubook133 said:
A couple of questions, just to make sure :
- there's a mix of upper case C and lower case c, I know they have slightly diff meanings in mac-fdisk, so is that intentional ?
Click to expand...
Yes. Lowercase c will automatically set the partition type to Apple_UNIX_SVR2 where capital C will let you manually specify the partition type. Using the latter will ensure that the bootstrap partition is actually a bootstrap partition.

Alubook133 said:
- from what I've seen in the video clip posted above the guy uses 3 partitions (sda8, 9 and 10), shouldn't swap and root be in different partitions ? In particular when in the Horizon installer using a custom partition setup how will I be able to separately define swap vs root if both reside in sda7 ?
Click to expand...
You are right; the root creation should be at 8p, not 7p. When I originally drafted this, I pointed swap at partition 6 assuming a free space was present there, but after looking again at your partition map that wasn't the case, so I changed 6 to 7 but didn't change 7 to 8. My apologies.

Keep in mind that when you deleted partition 7 it also merged its free space into the freespace at partition 8, so you don't need to worry about your root fs being 128M. If you're unsure at a step, print the partition table to reorient yourself.

Alubook133 said:
which I'll also have to exec (with the proper part # of course) prior to launching horizon-ui, or ?
Click to expand...
Correct.
 
No need to apologize at all, I'm learning quite a bit here. ;)

Interesting how partition sizes "self adapt" to what the user does, IIUC setting 7p to 1G for swap shrinks it from 40G to 1G (I'll probably do 2G) and hence frees 39G of space which are then available as sda8 (inserted at the b/o sda8 I suppose, though wondering what happens with the pre-existing 128M, find themselves at the very end of sda8 ?).

Well this is more out of curiosity than anything else (I'll check partitions at each step as you suggest), I think I've got all I need to safely install Adélie on my machine.
 
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Make sense, in fact I'd probably have better said that the starting block for sda8 gets moved "up" by a good 39GB when you shrink sda7 from 40G to 1G, while the end block stays unchanged at the end of the 128M chunk.

Wonder why these 128M extra free space blocks get created in Disk Util, oh well not too important.
 
Oops ! Problem : after deleting 7p (which shrank it down to 8.5M, I did a "p" to check the partitions after deletion but didn't notice the small size), I could not create a 2G swap partition as planned, instead I got an error as you can read below:

mac-fdisk_partition_issue.png

So... what should I do next ? Do I need to use/calc start and end blocks to create the swap partition ?
I see the 138G "Documents" partition has moved from sda9 to sda10, not sure it's a problem though (I'll see what happens when I next reboot into Sorbet).
 
I see what happened.

Creating the bootstrap partition had moved all the partition numbers down by one, because not all of the free space was used to create it. As you can see, the 40G Linux allocation is now at sda8 instead of sda7, and (unless you didn't write this) you may have kiboshed one of your volumes (the 8.5M "Boot OSX" volume).
 
Well actually no, it's doing d 7 which did that, since what you see in the pic is partitions right after d7, so _before_ the attempt to create a swap partition.

I have a backup for everything in that moved partition "Documents" so not a biggie, but still I don't know what I should do next...? Is this whole thing screwed, or ??

Edit : Ok so I have quit mac-fdisk, I'm hoping nothing got actually done since I didn't do a "w".
 
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Right. This was also after creating the bootstrap partition, and since the entire free space wasn't used for it, there is now a free space and a volume, and so all the partition IDs were bumped by 1.

OP
Screenshot_20250106_165522.png


#8
Screenshot_20250106_165741.png


Nothing is truly lost (as long as you didn't write the partition table), but try it again, now specifying to delete volume 8, create a swap there, and then create a root at volume 9.

Alternatively, you can fill the free space for the bootstrap volume using 2p for its size, which would result in the volumes not moving down

Apple Partition Map is a weird disk format.
 
Sorry yeah you're right it happened after creating the Bootstrap part (I mixed bootstrap with "swap" in yr mesg).

It's late at night here so I stopped the whole thing, rebooted into Sorbet to check everything's still fine as before (I did sweat a little ^^) and now shutdown the Alubook, I'll get back to it tomorrow or maybe at the week-end.

Good night all !
 
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Alubook133 said:
I didn't pay attention to this before but you're right there are 3 "extra partitions" created by the Apple Disk utilitity, each of size 128MB (here sda2, 4 and 8) that are deemed "free space", so I guess one may use them as one likes.
Click to expand...
I think the 128 MB partitions are free space used by the previous HFS+ partitions. They are usually for partitions that can boot. I don't know if they are required to support boot. I would leave them alone.

You could use iPartition.app to do the partitioning. It can be used to safely resize HFS+ partition if you need to make a new partition. It can safely move partitions. etc. You may need to execute the "Sort Partition Map" option after creating new partitions. You should backup the disk before partitioning.
https://coriolis-systems.com

I would use dumpvols.sh before and after modifying partitions to see how things are changed.
 
Note: We leave free space after each partition to make it easier for future system software to manipulate the partition map in ways that we can't anticipate currently.
Click to expand...

Technical Note TN2166: Secrets of the GPT

TN2166: Describes the new partition map format used by Intel-based Macintosh computers.
developer.apple.com

This is in regards to partitioning on an EFI disk, but I'd reasonably believe it's the same.
 
joevt said:
You could use iPartition.app to do the partitioning
Click to expand...
thanks for the suggestion but I'd rather learn by myself how this whole thing works than letting an external app do the job, eventually (not always a sure thing). At least initially, until I throw the towel and give in ^^.
 
Doq said:
Alternatively, you can fill the free space for the bootstrap volume using 2p for its size, which would result in the volumes not moving down
Click to expand...
I'm not sure but I seem to remember having read "somewhere" that the bootstrap volume must be exactly 100M in size. Sounds a bit silly, but...
 
Alubook133 said:
I'm not sure but I seem to remember having read "somewhere" that the bootstrap volume must be exactly 100M in size. Sounds a bit silly, but...
Click to expand...
No, the bootstrap volume can be any arbitrary size-- it just has to be HFS. 100M is just a good size to house GRUB and all of its relevant modules.
 
Ah, so maybe that's the simplest solution, make the Bootstrap part 128M i/o the usual 100M...

There should be an app to simulate APM shenanigans, would be soo convenient to avoid major mess up's. 😁

Anyhow I'm now back to the initial config.
 
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So... partitioning done, mkfs etc as well and no complaint from the machine. :)
(all this done with a FR keyboard not US, things like "mkswap" lots of fun to type in)

lsblk_post_partitionning.png

So... next step : run system installation.

EDITH : well that'll have to wait for later, I have mounted the partitions and stuff but no internet connection so it's a show stopper, will have to fix this when I have time.
In the meantime glad to see that my Tiger, Sorbet and Documents volumes are still there and intact ! ^^

new volumes.png
 
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One issue after next... 😏

I set up my Win11 PC (which connects to the internet via wifi) to share that connection thru ethernet (got 2 ethernet plugs on that PC), tied it to the Alubook, so did get an internet connection there (did some surfing with Netsurf while running Live Adélie, getting ready for the install), so I thought I'd go thru the install easy peasy.

Wrong. Arrived at the "Automatic Network Configuration" page, I'm getting a "Host distfiles.adelielinux.org not found". Tried to navigate to adelielinux.org with Netsurf, and get "Couldn't resolve host name".

So while most web sites I navigated to were Ok on the Alubook using the Win11 PC wifi shared connection, adelielinux.org is not attainable - while it's fine in Win11. DNS issue ? Gateway ? Don't know, and certainly don't know how to fix this in Linux if that's what's required. :x

Now I've picked the adelielinux.org IP address (216.82.192.11) and tried to navigate there, got the certificate issue which I skipped and then got a 404 Not Found which is normal and tells me the connection b/w the Alubook and adelielinux.org is possible.
If it's just a DNS issue I'd need to mod the Horizon script to look for the IP i/o the domain name, but can't do this of course.
 
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Ran into this too. Workaround I had to use was manually add to the /etc/hosts file:
Code: 
216.82.192.11   adelielinux.org distfiles.adelielinux.org
 
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Thanxx a lot, worked fine ! I'm starting to remember way back when I was working on Sun workstations in a previous life, of course the /etc/hosts file...! ☺️

Now on to the next issue... (too bad this is not mentioned anywhere btw)
 
That is just a case of virtual hostnane parsing on the host end. Once adding the requisite host data, the 404 issue shouldn't pop up (as the server is now receiving the correct hostname as expected).
 
New issue then :
"mounting /swapwithout options: No such device"
Click to expand...
and yes, no space between "swap" and "without"... the heck ??

Maybe I need to re-exec the sequence :

# mkfs.hfs /dev/sda2
# mkswap /dev/sda7
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda8

and then restart Horizon ? I don't see why I should have to do this though.

This is starting to feel uncomfortable having to rely on so much support to just install the OS - let alone trying to use it. 👎
 
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