IBM B50 running Fedora 16

[Ingvar Hagelund]

Just FYI, this can be done :)

The IBM 7046-B50 is a CHRP 604r (32bit ppc) running at blazing 375MHz.
It has that 16MB-should-be-enough-for-everybody OpenFirmare limit, so it
can't boot newer fedora install media. It may be able to boot Karsten's
ISO once he gets a 32bit version available :-)

The latest Fedora version that installs through normal media is Fedora
9. So I installed a minimum package set, and yum-upgraded through f10
and f11 to f12. From there I ran sharkcz' installroot trick*, and got a
working f16 environment using mash's package repo**

To get a clean boot, better add lvm2 and e2fsprogs to the rootfs. Also,
bind-mounting /sys, /boot and /proc into it while installing makes it
possible to chroot into it from the f12 host, and run yum self-hosted.

Not that hard, but it took a few hours to loop through the upgrade
cycles. The only really hack I had to do was to use an old mkinitrd from
f12 to build the f16 initrd. The dracut that comes with this f16 builds
a 15MB iniramfs, rendering it unbootable with this OpenFirmware. The
old-style mkinitrd builds a <4MB initrd.

Ingvar

*) http://sharkcz.livejournal.com/8649.html
**) http://koji.fedoraproject.org/mash/16/ppc/os