New firewall machine soonish

A while back a friend of mine moved out of town, and gave me some of his old computers. He's a Mac guy, so they were a bit different from all the x86 stuff I've got around me. One of them was a Umax c500/180, one of the few (so I understand) Apple clones. It's got a 180MHz 603e processor, I think 92 MB of RAM, 2 PCI slots, and a 2GB hard drive -- which is currently split between OS8 and an old version of Yellow Dog Linux. Being the perverse bastard I am, I've decided to try and get Gentoo going on it (from Stage 1, baby! yeah!) and turning into a firewall machine.

I'm picking up the Apple terminology slowly. It's taken a good month to bang into my head that this is an Old World machine -- which means you can't just throw in a CD and boot from it. Oh no. You need to use BootX, an Apple extension that, early in the boot process, asks if you want to keep running the Mac OS or switch to Linux. To add a new kernel -- like, say, your install CD kernel -- you need to copy important files into the right folder in Mac OS. Not only that, but because the machine is old and funky enough, you need to download certain non-schedule kernels to get it to work...but then it works great. My kernel args were a little different:

cdroot root=/dev/ram0 rw init=linuxrc loop=livecd.squashfs looptype=squashfs console=tty0 nodevfs udev video=imsttfb

But hey! Worked! At least, until I started getting SIG11 errors...time to rip out some memory, I guess.

Update: Huh...reseating the RAM and the CPU seems to have done the trick. Currently compiling binutils with no problem.