Woof.
At least the YDL installation guide warns you that it won't
install 2.2 over an existing system (in my case, a heavily
modified LinuxPPC 2000) unless you let it write the
partition map. I don't *want* to write a partition map,
I'm quite happy with my partitioning scheme as it stands.
I don't want to risk losing data on the MacOS partitions, or
on my /home or /usr/src partitions.
A recent salvo of thunderstorms has prevented me from
trying this already, but I'm planning to try booting the
rescue RAMdisk from the Tasty Morsels CD, blowing away
the old install, then start loading RPMs. Has anyone gone
this route who can warn me about pitfalls? Or is there a
better way?
<aside type="rant">RPM really bites (appropriate for a
distro that has the word "dog" in its name). And some of
the essential RPMs that come with YellowDog look like
someone left a 40-lb. bag of dog chow out where they
could just eat & eat & eat... take glibc-common (please):
157MB unpacked, 95% of it is locales. Why the hey
didn't they just make RPMs for each locale and let us
load whichever ones we want/need? And the kernel RPM
is nearly as bad, throwing in every single module known
to humanity & a few known only to extraterrestrials.
There's another candidate for breaking up.
Sure, I can go in after installing & delete the excess junk,
but there are lots of people out there who won't know to &
I shouldn't have to do that anyway. And there are those
with smaller disks who won't even be able to get *that*
far. (I tried building a small bootable image using YDL's
RPMs just for grins, man was that ever a waste of time.)
Furrfu. If my home connection wasn't a dialup, I would
have gone with Debian or LFS.</aside>
Then there's this whole issue of preserving an old install.
It sure would be nice if there was an option "I know I'm
going to blow away my old system, I don't care, that's what
I want and I'll accept the consequences." And how about
running a shell in one of the text consoles like LinuxPPC
used to do, huh?
--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
-- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc
--
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