It’s hip2b2

Should have been a straight forward process but quirks in the Darwin installer added around one (1) hour of twiddling to an otherwise simple process. Here is what I had to do to get it all working.

1. Download Darwin OSX install image. You can do this by visiting the Apple Open Source website that contains a nicely packaged ISO for your installation convenience.
2. Make sure your copy of VMWare Server is working. You can download VMWare server for free to the VMWare website. Fortunately, they have fixed the kernel bugs already that prevent VMWare from properly building before.
3. Create a new Virtual Machine. Ok the normally procedure would be to create a new VM. Select “Others” as the operating system. Specify the amount of RAM you would like to assign that VM (I choose 256MB). Create a new IDE hard disk to install your Darwin files (take note it SHOULD BE IDE and not SCSI). Mount the ISO image under the CDROM device. Normally, this should be ok. But, it will get stuck with the error “still waiting for root device”.
4. Shuffle around IDE devices. You will notice that the CDROM is mounted as the IDE (1:0) device. Your hard disk is mounted as IDE (0:0). You should move the CDROM to IDE (0:1) instead.

The rest of the installation process should proceed by answering the questions prompted by the install. I allowed the installer to specify the partitioning. The system will then proceed to install the files. After which it will prompt you for a reboot.

Here are some additional things you might want to do to get a decently working system.

• Setting your hostname. This can be done by editing the /etc/hostconfig file and filling in the hostname field. You can also configure your default router here. However, I plan to use DHCP so this should be moot.
• Configuring networking. Edit the /etc/iftab file. Replace the line under the en0 network device from AUTOMATIC to DHCP. This is because I plan to use DHCP.
• Running the SSH daemon. Edit the /etc/hostconfig file. You can see an option for SSHSERVER there.

Still more things you can do here. When in doubt this is a BSD system so your BSD knowledge should come in handily.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Open source, apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.