i would like to install gentoo 1.2 or 1.4rc5 on a power mac 8550. current hardware config of the machine is 288M ram, 8G available disk at scsi lun 5. the machine is currently running macos 9.1 in multi-user mode. i'm having trouble with the initial boot seqeunce. so far: i downloaded the ppc 1.2 installation instructions and have tried to follow them closely. in the first section, the Installer.sit container is mentioned, but the location is not given. i did find version 1.8 on the 1.2 release of the ppc gentoo iso. (i usually start with recent releases, so i invested a significant amount of time looking for the Installer on the 1.4rc5 iso's. why is it not on them?). after installing the BootX control panel and attendant kernel images, etc, i get the following problems. when i select linux from the BootX dialog box, the kernel copied to the 9.1 system folder begins the boot routine, but panics with a series of failures on device 08.01. the messages are approximately: kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 08.01... rebooting in 180 seconds. any help would be most appreciated.
Sorry for the state that the oldworld instructions are in. You'll need to use the installer on the 1.2 CD, and in the BootX options dialog, use the provided ramdisk. That should provide you with an enviroment to chroot from, in which case you can proceed with a 1.4 stage tarball. Please feel free to join #gentoo-ppc on irc.freenode.net for more help.
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