Subject: Re: Switching from BootX to yaboot
From: Paul J. Lucas (pauljlucas@mac.com)
Date: Wed Feb 21 2001 - 20:39:17 MST
On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Graham Leggett wrote:
> After upgrading MacOS on my system to v9.1, I can no longer use BootX to
> boot Linux on my 1999 Bronze Powerbook G3. The solution I am told is to
> use yaboot/ybin.
I /may/ eventually upgrade to yaboot to get XFree86 4.x (or use
a 2.4 kernel).
> Documentation is a bit scattered,
Yes, annoyingly so. I tried to find documentation for making
Open Firmware scripts and didn't find anything except the stock
ones that people use.
> ... but so far it looks like I will have to repartition my drive, or at least
> destroy my MacOS partition to get this working.
Just try it on your existing MacOS partition. You may not need
a separate boot partition.
I played with this stuff briefly and I found that I couldn't get
Open Firmware to recognize yaboot as something it can run unless
I used the hfsutils and set the proper type/creator to make it
appear as a MacOS ROM file.
Note, however, that I have /not/ yet made the switch from BootX.
(I actually /like/ the BootX interface much better with the cute
penguin.)
You might also try playing with Apple's System Disk utility
instead of yaboot. See:
http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n60217
Also search the TIL for "System Disk."
- Paul
P.S.: This lack of documentation is a gripe about Terrasoft.
They /should/ have all this stuff right on their web page and
in their documentation. Instead, they have a mailing list
archive that is fairly broken (double search results, or none)
and a poor FAQ (where the stuff isn't even in the form of a
question -- would never fly on Jeopardy). "What? System Disk
can be used to boot Linux on a Mac? Quick! Update our web
pages with the info!" But no... Sigh...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed Feb 21 2001 - 20:39:28 MST