Re: potato boot-floppies for powerpc uploaded
At 08:50 -0700 1999-10-18, Matt Porter wrote:
On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 05:27:10PM +0300, Petter Sundlöf wrote:
That sounds über-neato.
Anyway, it does no good to me, because I have no idea how to utilize
PC-style floppy booting. Do I need to play with bootvars?
Good question...I don't know, I'm not a Mac PowerPC person...yet. :)
Once you can get to OF, it'd be:
'boot fd:linux load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/ram' (I think).
To boot with bootx, copy root.bin into the same folder as the bootx
app itself and rename it to ramdisk.image.gz, you also need the linux
kernel image, which should be placed in the 'Linux Kernels' folder;
then launch the bootx app and make sure to check the 'Use ramdisk'
checkbox.
From what I've read, you don't need to play with bootvars to boot the
HFS boot image I've made. I'd look at the LinuxPPC installation manual
and key off of that. They give examples of boot commands for OF to boot
an HFS floppy. I thought bootvars was just for hard drive boots.
The problem is that most powermacs have horrid Open Firmware, and the
input-device and output-device are set to ttya (so bootvars is the
only way short of attaching a serial console to get to OF).
None of this applies to post-iMac systems, which actually do have
decent OF with sensible defaults (however, those will not boot Linux
kernels because the images lack the .note section that the new OF
requires).
Give me a couple weeks and I'll know more...I haven't seen many Mac people
around here interested in getting boot images working (as evidenced by
none contributing to powerpc boot-floppies devel).
I think I'm the only pmac person making any boot-floppies contribution at all.
--
Joel Klecker (aka Espy) Debian GNU/Linux Developer
<URL:mailto:jk@espy.org> <URL:mailto:espy@debian.org>
<URL:http://web.espy.org/> <URL:http://www.debian.org/>
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