8. Boot the machine

In this chapter we will boot our fresh installed system for the first time, and make some small custom changes to make it work as it should

You are done! If everything worked, you should now be able to reboot you're system, and start LinuxPPC-2000 Q4 for the first time. Reinsert the boot floppy disk in the floppy drive, and switch the machine on again. If it won't boot, try to hit F5 at the splash screen while the system check icons pop up in the bottom of the screen. At the boot prompt, ("Linux/PPC load:") you must add a boot parameter to make the system find your root partition. (That's usually the main system partition.) Press backspace to remove what's already there, and add something like this:

root=/dev/sda5

I use sda5 as sda5 is where I have installed my root partition, that is, the partition mounted at "/". You might have something different, and you should have written it down when you partitioned you harddisk(s). You did, didn't you?

The system should boot up, and after a minute or so, greet you with a login prompt. Congratulations, you have installed LinuxPPC-2000 Q4 on your computer! From here, you have to know how to use linux. This is absolutely outside the scope of this document, but if you are a complete newbie, you could for example check out Linux Administration Made Easy by Steve Frampton, and start at chapter 6, since you've already got your system up.

If you are not an US citizen, you should look over the X configuration file to get your local keyboard. Use a text editor like vi or pico, just like we did to get the installation system to work. Try

vi /etc/X11/XF86Config

and scroll down to the Keyboard section. Check that you have settings that suits you. Edit as you wish. You may also want to remove LinuxPPC's annoying attempt to autoconfigurate X for you when the machine boots into runlevel 5.

rm -f /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/*Xautoconfig

The next time you power-cycle the box, you must again boot from the floppy. The bootloader arguments at the boot prompt ("Linux/PPC Load:") should be still be something like this:

root=/dev/sda5

Where of course, you may have something different from sda5, according to where your root partition is.

This is the time to install the rest of the system, with all the packages that are on the software CD. Login as root, open a terminal window, insert the CD, mount it, and start the package upgrade program:

mount -t HFS -o ro /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom xupgrade