[TriLUG] Yellow Dog Troubles

[John Matthews]

I have been unable to burn a bootable CD-R of Yellow Dog Linux from the
.iso images I found online. If anyone has a copy or can burn a copy
(must be bootable on a Mac) then I'll gladly trade blank media and/or
moolah for them at the meeting tonight. (Email me:
jvmatthe at math.duke.edu )

The story so far...
Has anyone tried burning CD-Rs of the YDL .iso images available online?
It could just be me and my Mac, but my impression is that they aren't
actually hybrid images. And the mkINSTALLCD script that they provide is
kind of broken, or at the very least difficult to use. For example, the
script encourages you to use mkisofs, but since mkisofs was merged with
mkhybrid, I don't believe you can make HFS images that are *not*
read-only. So when you need to "bless" the appropriate parts of the HFS
portion of the hybrid with hfsutils (hmount, hattrib, etc.) it complains
that the thing you're trying to change is marked read-only. Mandrake's
beta PPC distro actually includes a binary of an older version of
mkhybrid that does work and uses mkhybrid in their variation on YDL's
mkINSTALLCD script. After getting the older mkhybrid, making a hybrid
image that was *not* read-only, and actually having the "bless" commands
work like they should (or so it seemed), the disc that came out of it
was still not bootable. If my suspicion is correct (about YDL not making
hybrid images available) then it seems like a bit of a gimmick to get
you to buy their discs instead of doing it yourself from the online
versions.

Anyway, if anyone has any experience with this, I'd be curious to know
how you got things working. Last night I finished wgetting the Mandrake
beta PPC .iso images and may try those next, but I don't have high
hopes, if they have the same problems.

Naturally, I could just have a screwed up Mac, but the OS 9.x and OS
7.5.3 discs boot fine from the CD without any coaxing.

Regards,
matt

-- 
Matt Matthews     \ ph: 919.660.2859                         \ Use        _o)
Duke University    \ em: jvmatthe at math.duke.edu               \ GNU/Linux /\\
Dept. of Mathematics\ www: http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ Today   _\_V