installing Fedora on a G5 Xserve without an optical drive?

milktree · #1 March 10th, 2008, 04:29 PM

Hi,

I'm trying to install Fedora Core 7 on a bunch of dual G5 Xserves that don't have optical drives.

I've tried installing over the net (a technique that works on the Mac-minis) and tried pulling the drives and installing them from the Mac-minis using a USB enclosure (which works when booting the Mac minis) and I've tried a firewire DVD drive (which works for installing OSX) and plugging a SATA DVD drive directly onto the motherboard (which fails the same way as the external firewire or usb DVD drives)

The failure is that I can hold down option and the screens shows the DVD as a valid boot device, but it doesn't boot. it just mucks up the colors, and drops me back to the "choose boot disk" screen.

Is there something fundamentally different about the Xserves that is getting in my way? I'm totally baffled.

thanks,

-Will

nixgeek · #2 March 11th, 2008, 10:22 AM

If you're not particular to just Fedora, have you tried Debian or Ubuntu? If it's going to be for server use, Debian might be the better option.

milktree · #3 March 11th, 2008, 05:55 PM

Unfortunately, I'm stuck with Fedora Cora 7, because that's the OS we're doing some PPC testing on.

I've tried an Ubuntu live CD, and it fails the same way, it displays the CD as a viable boot option, but then drops me back into the "select boot device" menu with screwed up colors. I get the same behavior with the FC4 install disk, the FC7 install disk, and the FC8 live disk.

what's interesting is that yaboot (every version I've been able to get my hands on) seems to fail by not requesting the yaboot.conf file from the tftp server.

Everything works just fine with a Mac-mini.

it almost seems like there's a bug or missing feature in yaboot such that it doesn't work with Xserves, or something like that.

bleh.

nixgeek · #4 March 11th, 2008, 07:27 PM

Ahh....sorry to hear that it didn't turn out so well with GNU/Linux on the PowerPC Xserve. How odd that it doesn't have an optical drive.

milktree · #5 March 17th, 2008, 10:58 AM

The Xserves came in two flavors, a "Queen Bee" type with video, optical drive, and two hard drives, and a "worker bee" flavor that had only one hard drive, no video, and no optical drive. The theory was that you installed the OS onto the second drive of the Queen, and then swapped it with the drive in the worker.

This does leave me stumped though, since there's no obvious reason why yaboot doesn't work on my machines.