Auto-booting USB stick in OF

[Risto Suominen <risto.suominen@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Strictly speaking, this is not a Debian issue, not even Linux, but
since I don't know of any Open Firmware list, and it may be just a
matter of time before someone else tries this...

I wrote the following two lines into OF nvramrc parameter with
'nvedit' (Read this to the end before trying yourself!):

devalias usb /pci@f2000000/usb@19/disk@1
dev /options " usb" open-dev dup if close-dev " usb:,\\:tbxi" "
boot-device" property else drop then

I ran this manually with 'nvrun' and achieved what I wanted: (1) if
there was a USB stick plugged-in on boot, the boot-device shown by
'.properties' was changed to 'usb:,\\:tbxi' (The boot-device shown by
'printenv' does not change.), and saying 'boot' booted Linux from the
stick, (2) if no USB stick was present, the boot-device remained, thus
allowing to boot from hard disk.

Then I made the fatal error, I ran 'nvstore', 'setenv use-nvramrc?
true' and 'shut-down'. Now the machine won't boot anymore. The chime
is there but the display remains black.

The machine in question is an iBook G3 Dual USB 500 MHz.

Risto