RE: Booting only to Linux


Subject: RE: Booting only to Linux
From: Ferwerda Darren (app3dxf) (app3dxf@ups.com)
Date: Mon Jan 07 2002 - 06:37:22 MST


Doug,

Please correct me if I am wrong someone, but, those magic partitions
are where the OF looks for it's drivers for it's device tree. The way
I understand it, OF has no inherent ability to access any devices, like
a BIOS does. Instead, to be a little more flexible, and therefore more
complicated, the drivers were moved over to the "magic" partitions so that
updates to the drivers could be performed, and increase performance without
having to deal with flash ROM. If there is a better explanation somewhere
out in the ether about this, could you please post it as a reply, as I
would greatly appreciate it. The drivers are probably copyrighted to Apple,
so, copying them without permission, would not be a good idea. Getting
a license would probably mean boku bucks.

Darren

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Philips [mailto:dgou@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 1:21 AM
To: yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com
Subject: Booting only to Linux

I just upgraded the disk on my 266MHz iMac and thought I'd pass on a tidbit
for consideration.
Since I am only going to run Linux (no MacOS on this machine), and since I
had a fresh disk, I knew that I had to run the MacOS drive initializer and
install to get the initial magic partitions onto the disk (hey, they're just

bits, why canna YDL do it instead?). Once the drive was initialized, I
started the OS installation. As soon as it got past the 'updating drivers'
at the beginning I cancelled it and rebooted into the YDL install disk. The
magic partitions were their, so I was able to reorganize the the rest of the

disk and do my install with only about 5 minutes spent getting MacOS to do
the partition dirty work. No need to install the MacOS at all!

-Doug

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