To boot the 7248-133, just insert the bootdisk and swhitch on the machine. Do NOT have the linuxppc-1999 CD in the CD drive. If it won't boot off the floppy drive, check SMS settings (chapter 2), and try to force a floppy boot by pressing F5 (or F6) at the bootscreen while the check icons pop up in the bottom of the screen. After a while, the screen blanks out, and Linux will boot. At this point, you can shout a little "hooray" for yourself, if there are not too many in the room. Insert the ramdisk root floppy and ramdisk floppy #2 when prompted.
After some seconds, the familiar (for some of us) RedHat installer program starts up. If it's unfamiliar, RedHat has some instructions on how to use it here. Don't continue the installation process unless according to this document, though.
Press OK, select English language and Press OK. LinuxPPC supports other languages rather badly. You might select another another language to get an english/other language mix installation. Could even be funny. At the next screen, select your keyboard type and press OK.
You should be at the Installation Method screen. Do NOT select the local CDROM option. Instead, press CTRL-Z to enter a shell. Here is the first bug we have to work around. Of some strange reason, the kernel might have tried to mount the CD-ROM already. Issue the command
mount
to check if this is the case for you too. If you get a line
like this:
/dev/cdrom on /mnt/cdrom type iso9660 (ro)
you must unmount the CD-ROM before you continue. Just issue the
command
umount /mnt/cdrom
Now: If you have a 7248-133 model, this should be everything
you have to do. just type
exit
to return to the installer, and continue the installation.
If the /dev/cdrom is not on the list, just type exit, and
continue. Thanks to Arne Chr. Jørgensen for sorting
this out.
Note: I've heard from some people that this tip does not allways work, even on 133 models. In these cases, follow the instructions for the 7248-100 model as described below.
If you have a 7248-100 model, the path ahead is a little more difficult, but we'll get through it. If you exit back to the installation program and choose to install from the CD-ROM, the program will refuse to mount the CD-ROM properly, and then freeze. Because of this, we have to do some more manual configuration. 7248-100 owners should NOT exit, but go to this page to continue.