[colin_419]

Hey thanks Raion and robespierre! This is all very insightful! I have tried following the instructions thoroughly using the guide you linked to Raion, and it has been abundantly helpful in learning how to configure and install software to the machine.

I had previously printed the env to inspect for AutoLoad and other vars to give me some insight into what the machine may be doing. AutoLoad=yes, and to my inspection of the variables it does seem everything is reasonably configured to my knowledge. I do believe that I'm not understanding something about either fx, miniroot, or the Inst process (such as using list or selecting features). To fill you in, I am using LOVE for this process. After letting fx perform an [a]uto format (slow, I waited for over an hour), I exited and installed software from love.62.

Executing auto booted into sash.

Here's a look at my partitions using the output of fx (l/sh/a):

----- current drive geometry -----
Tracks/zone = 1 Set/track = 109
Alt sect/zone = 1 Interleave = 1 Cylinders = 4026
Alt track/volume = 0 Cylinder skew = 45 Heads = 4
Alt track/zone = 0 Track skew = 36 Data bytes/sec = 512
Rotational rate = 5376
----- partitions -----
part type blocks Megabytes
0: xfs 215076 + 1894764 105 + 925
1: raw 4096 + 210980 2 + 103
8: volhdr 0 + 4096 0 + 2
10: volume 0 + 2109840 0 + 1030
----- bootinfo -----
root partition = 0 swap partition = 1 bootfile = /unix
----- directory entries -----
0: ide block 3 size 283648 1: sash block 557 size 283648
----- sgi-info -----
serial = name = SEAGATE ST51080N 0958

Does my partitioning provide any insight into my installation not being performed correctly? If I'm not mistaken, I should be seeing a unix directory or files in here, but clearly I don't have that. Thanks again to both of you, I really appreciate you taking the time to clue me into what I'm not understanding here. I'll be re-reading the instructions from love for about the twelfth time just to make sure I'm not missing something here.

Edit:
I did want to mention that I wouldn't expect anyone to spoon feed me commands to run. Feel free to nudge me in the right direction if you see something amiss. I can manage reading into any sort of suggestions you have. I greatly appreciate any suggestions!