I happened apun my old iMac the other day, it’s one of those all in one deals. Think they called it a jellybean or something similar to that. Anyway I am running out of file space on my main system, and thought that just maybe it would make a nice little file server for a little extra storage and a few other things. After booting it up, first time I bet in over a year, I discovered I had already installed a linux system on it, but wanted to convert it to openSuse 11. Figuring it would make it a tad easier.
So I went to the openSuse download page, selected PowerPC for my hardware and selected Network for the Installation Medium. Not it shows 3 choices here, Dvd, LiveCD and Network, if you select the LiveCD it will tell you it is only available on DvD or Network for the PowerPC. Anyways I downloaded the MiniCD (about 97mb) for the PowerPC and burned it to a normal r/w cd, ( I did not have any blank dvds and really didn’t want to run out to get one, so this is the reason for the route I went.)
Once I powered up the ole iMac and popped in the cd I just burnt, the openSuse installation text screen appeared wanting to know how you are going to install , I selected ’slp’ after trial and error. It configured the network card for internet use and popped up the next string of menus. Now if you read and follow the Install_Internet page you maybe able to actually hit F2, F3, ect as the page states, however either because my iMac was too old to be reconized properly or it just wasn’t that way I don’t know… but I just followed the menu entries in order adjusting what I needed to adjust. At any rate, I bet just accepting the defaults will work, least they did with me.
Once again, not sure why other then the fact that when it configured it didn’t do dns for some reason, but I had to look up the ip address of the mirror I was going to use and enter that. No biggy I did have my main system to get that information, so hint: make sure you get the ip address and the full path to the repo else you will be out of luck.
It was after I connected to the repo and the yast2 installer was downloaded and started did I get any graphical display as you normally would. Once again not biggy. When it came to the desktop setting, I opted for the min. server. I really don’t need a gui other then the console since all it was going to do would be a file server and local dns server. After about 20 minutes, my install was complete and I was doing the first reboot.
I had issues here as well, because it was still looking for a cd for more software, but I just cancelled out and let it reboot one last time. Then I did a full update from the console zypper ref && zypper -n –type=package rebooted one last time. I had a nice little fileserver up and running.
I also plan on running a caching DNS server, since charter.net dns servers seem to have issues from time to time (i.e. they time out.) And a local caching DNS server helps with that. I’ll do a howto on that later on.
Tags: howto, install, powerpc, Server
Posted in openSuse | Comments (0)
