[seul-edu] Mac/Linux Xterminals--first work session

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

   I met with one of the parents from the parochial school I'm trying to help
this afternoon.  He brought one of their Mac Quadra 650s along for us to install
Debian m68k Linux on, in preparation for making it into an Xterminal.  The first
order of business was to see what hardware resources we had to work with.

   The Quadra 650 had 16 MB of RAM, which didn't seem too bad, but only a 166
MB harddrive, of which about 64 MB was already taken up by MacOS 7.6.1, Netscape
Navigator, a news reader, an email client, a telnet client, an FTP client, and
some utilities.  We decided to continue.  If we were successful, we wouldn't need
any of that software anyway.

   My first task was to connect the Mac to my Linux box.  I had previously
downloaded all the software we'd need, so I figured it would be as simple as just
wiring the two systems together with an ethernet crossover cable and configuring
their TCP/IP stacks properly.  Unfortunately, that didn't work as I'd hoped. 
Even though I set them up in what seemed the proper manner, they wouldn't
communicate.  Rather than obsess on making them talk, I just connected the Mac directly
to my cable modem, went out to the internet, and re-downloaded the software we
needed.

   The first thing we had to do was to create three diskettes from disk image
files.  One was in a MacOS format, and the Apple Disk Copy utility worked fine
for that.  The other two were in MS-DOS format, and the Apple utility wouldn't
even see them as disk images.  Oh well, I still hadn't erased the files from my
system, so I used dd to create the appropriate diskettes.

   The next task was to partition the Mac's harddrive.  For that we used
Apple's HD SC utility.  Unfortunately, it recognized the entire 166 MB as one
partition, which was currently in use and therefore unavailable to create the Linux
partitions.  Linux can't boot natively on a Mac (at least on the Motorola-based
ones; I don't know about the PowerPC Macs).  You must boot from a MacOS partition
and use a loader.  That means that you must keep a minimal MacOS setup on the
harddrive.  Since we had booted from the harddrive, our only option was to
completely initialize the drive, which would have wiped out the MacOS system and made the
Mac unbootable.  We would clearly have to boot the system from a floppy, run
the partitioning utility, install a minimal MacOS system, and go from there.  That
may also entail re-downloading the Debian software yet again, as it will likely
be wiped out in the repartitioning and it's too large to backup to floppies.

   We stopped at that point.  My associate is going to go find some MacOS boot
diskettes and do a little research on Apple websites as to what a minimal MacOS
install is, while I'm going to do the same sort of research on Linux sites and
think of what software we'll need on the MacOS side (an FTP client, the Mac
equivalent of gzip, etc.) we'll need to make a go of this.  Well, they say that any
project you don't start over at least once is probably going in the wrong
direction.  I think we're safe from that fate.

   When we finish our research (it should only take a day or two) we'll
reschedule a time to continue this experiment.  We hope to come up with a
straightforward procedure that will make doing the other 8 Quadras pretty much a cookbook
effort.  Once we've cleared that hurdle we'll have to set up a Linux app server for
them to use, but that should be pretty simple since I've done a fair amount of
those.

-- 
Doug Loss            Always acknowledge a fault.  This will throw
dloss@csrlink.net    those in authority off their guard and give
(570) 326-3987       you the opportunity to commit more.
                        Mark Twain