Subject: Configuring yaboot on iBook
From: Josh Smith (irilyth@infersys.com)
Date: Fri May 05 2000 - 02:01:29 MDT
I installed YDL CS 1.2 on a new iBook recently, and let me start by saying
that I love it. I use RHL 6.2 extensively at work, and I love the fact that
the YDL installer is nearly identical similar to Red Hat's. LinuxPPC may
have gotten better recently, but they drove me nuts with their goofy
graphical installer, which didn't work at all right on my 2400c, when I
tried it a few months ago. Of course, I'm probably preaching to the choir on
this list, but hey. (grin)
Anyway, that said: I was *very* frustrated at the very end of the install
process, because I had a hell of a time getting yaboot working. The YDL
manual's instructions were much closer to what I ended up needing to do than
any of the web pages that I found, but they were maddeningly off in a couple
of respects. I originally planned to send this info along to the folks at
TerraSoft, but since there seems to be at least one TSS person on the list,
I figure I'll send it here, and others on the list may end up benefiting
directly as well.
Both of my problems were related to the yaboot.conf file. The first was that
the manual says
If your Linux boot partition was /dev/hda9 under Linux, you would want to
use the above line with the following: "image=hd:9,\\vmlinux"
I tried that (using the proper device for my Linux /boot partition), and it
didn't work at all; the yaboot prompt came up, but then said that it
couldn't load the kernel image.
Now, the instructions also tell you to copy a kernel from the CD to /vmlinux
on your *Mac* partition, and it turns out that if you give it that path
(e.g. 'image=hd:8,\\vmlinux'), it works fine (which is probably why they
tell you to copy it there :^). But the fact that the instructions say "Linux
boot partition" led me to waste a great deal of time trying to figure out
where on my Linux filesystem the kernel was supposed to be. :^( If the
instructions made it clear that you should put the yaboot stuff on an HFS
partition (either the main one where you run MacOS, or a separate one if you
want to (or if you don't want to run MacOS at all)), it would've saved me a
lot of heartache.
The second thing that caught me was that the directions said
Unless your system requires "No video driver", you may remove the
"novideo" entry from the [yaboot.conf] config file. (See X configuration.)
That sounded to me like it was encouraging me to remove the "novideo" entry
unless I knew that I needed it, and furthermore, that the "novideo" option
had something to do with X configuration. So, I figured that I'd leave it
out, and get my system booted into a text console, and then worry about
whether I needed the novideo option in order to get X working. I also
figured that if it didn't work, it'd fail in some fairly obvious and
spectacular way.
Well, it did fail, but it wasn't at all obvious what the problem was. When
the system started up, the very first screen after the yaboot prompt came
up, but it then seemed to hang, and nothing else obvious ever happened (i.e.
the bit where it discovers the system's hardware, says "Welcome to Yellow
Dog Linux", lists all the daemons starting up, and eventually gives you a
login prompt, none of that came up).
I was still trying to figure out what the "image" line in my yaboot.conf was
supposed to say, so it didn't occur to me at first that this had anything to
do with the lack of the "novideo" option. After a while, though, I realized
that it wasn't actually hung: I heard clicking noises on my hard drive, so
it seemed like it must be doing something... But I couldn't figure out what,
because nothing visible was happening. I finally confirmed that it was in
fact booting, because I could ping the system after a minute or two of this
seeming inactivity... So it was coming up, it just wasn't displaying
anything on the console for some reason.
Well, it turns out that all I needed was the "novideo" line, and then
everything worked like a charm. I'd tuned it out because of the reference to
X configuration, and the manual didn't mention this failure mode, so I was
sure for the longest time that I was still specifying the wrong path to the
kernel, or the wrong boot partition, or something else. "novideo" never even
crossed my mind, until I ran out of other ideas.
So, my suggestion would be to mention in the manual that (a) you need
"novideo" on an iBook; (b) "novideo" isn't just X related; (c) if you remove
it on a system where you need it, you may get the behavior I describe.
I'm assuming, incidentally, that all of the above is true in general of
iBooks, and not peculiar to my installation. If other iBook users have been
able to boot off of a kernel on a Linux filesystem, or without the novideo
option, I'd be interested to hear more about it.
To end on a positive note: Other than the Ethernet problem I described in an
earlier message, everything else is working great. I got a Logitech 3-button
USB mouse, and it worked perfectly, right out of the box. I downloaded a
bunch of software [1], and was able to compile away to my heart's content.
Yay!
-Josh (irilyth@infersys.com)
[1] I figured out that I could get around the Ethernet problem, which was
too flaky for me to get reliable results on big file transfers with scp,
by downloading things under MacOS, rebooting into Linux, mounting my
MacOS partition, and copying the files over.
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