Subject: Re: Mac Newbie yaboot question
From: Jason S. Moore (jsmoore@brain.uccs.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 20:21:31 MDT
AFAIK the Open Firmware can only boot off of HFS partitions(UFS I think
too, like OSX) so you need at least a small HFS partition that contains
your kernel, yaboot.tbxi, and yaboot.conf. then you tell the open firmware
to boot like:
boot hd:x,\yaboot.tbxi
where x is the HFS partiton number, and of course the yaboot.conf file
being setup appropriately. This won't make the change permanent, you can do
that by using a setenv command on the boot variable I think.
Hope this helps,
Jason
Steve Cockwell wrote:
> Hi folks.
>
> I was recently asked by a customer of mine why I don't carry any PPC
> Linux products on my site, and I didn't really have a good answer for
> him. Running Linux under PPC seems like a good idea and being an old
> Amiga rat, I was definately interested.
>
> With that in mind, I picked up my mother's iMac from the repair shop on
> Friday. I purchased one of the original iMacs when they came out for my
> mother because I didn't want to be on the phone with her every day of
> the week walking her through yet another Windows problem. As it turned
> out, my first experience with a Mac since my early days with Corel
> turned out to be less than stellar. When the iMac's display started to
> shimmer and shake and occasionally blank out I was second guessing my
> decision. When the USB stuff started to lock up randomly (even after
> the original patch was made to MacOS) I broke down and sent the thing
> back.
>
> I left it in the shop for almost a year :-) and gave my mother a laptop
> to run in the meantime. When I picked it up on Friday I found out that
> they had replaced just about everything on it. The motherboard was new,
> the video board was new (I suppose this would be the high-voltage board,
> not the display adapter), and the hard drive had been formatted and
> pre-installed with MacOS 9. It worked flawlessly.
>
> I decided that before I gave it back to her, I was going to put an OS on
> it that I could stand. So I did a little research and settled on Yellow
> Dog Linux. I downloaded the ISO, fried up a CDR, got the PDF install
> guide and set in to do the install. I couldn't tell for certain from
> the instructions if it was okay to toast all of the Mac partitions on
> the drive, but it was my intention to relieve the Mac from it's native
> OS - completely. So I did.
>
> For the last few hours I've been trying to figure out what it is about
> the iMac that I don't know, or about Yellow Dog that I didn't understand
> - but I can't boot YDL to save my life. I've partitioned the drive with
> a swap (100Meg) and a root (the rest of the 4Gig drive). I've booted
> the cd and ran through the install - no problems.
>
> As per the instructions, I booted the Mac into it's firmware and spent a
> lot of time playing around with it's settings trying to convince it to
> boot the image YDL left on the root partition. No dice.
>
> So you will all have to forgive me for being really stupid. I know a
> *lot* about Linux, but almost nothing about Macs. I can read. I've
> searched the archives and read the install guide. Either I'm trying to
> do something that's impossible, or I'm missing something important. I
> can't shake the feeling that thousands of others must have installed YDL
> on an iMac without the MacOS.
>
> Yes, I caught the references to installing a partition on the Mac with
> the MacOS install CD, but without the actual OS. However, I assumed
> (possibly incorrectly) that this was a requirement for machines that did
> not have new(ish) firmware.
>
> Would some kind soul steer me back on course? I really would like to do
> this exclusively with YDL, but I could be convinced to break down and
> try to find the original MacOS 8 CDs that came with the box if I had to.
>
> Thanks,
>
> .src
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