sebyte wrote:
I have partitioned my hard drive, (using Apple's Disk Utility), as follows:
As was mentioned in another reply, you shouldn't try to do the partitioning through Apple's Disk Utility. IMHO, it's terrible, not to mention it wastes big chunks of space between partitions for no discernable reason at all.
Also, I don't believe you'll be able to write to a MacOS/OpenStep UFS filesystem from Linux anyway. I think there's a way you can make a FAT32 filesystem in an Apple partition, and use that, and if possible that's probably your best bet.
And since you're installing on a laptop, why are you splitting your main filesystem into partitions? Especially "/boot, /tmp, /var, /usr, /home, etc." all on one FS? That's a very poor layout, really. Better to just go with one FS for your root, one for the exchange partition, one for OS X, the 800 KB bootstrap partition, and your swap partition. Also, after you've set up the MacOS X partition, and got it all happy, do the rest of the partition in Linux using mac-fdisk. You'll save a lot of space that way.
*"No bootstrap partition found. There must be an 800K Apple_Bootstrap partition named 'bootstrap' of type 'Apple_Bootstrap' before you can continue"*, or words to that effect.
You have to make an 800KB (1600 block) partition of type Apple_Bootstrap for yaboot to install itself into. If you don't do this, you won't be able to boot Linux on your Powerbook. (I think that's actually mentioned in the Debian install guide for PowerPC - did you read it?)
Is this message not referring to partition 1, (which shows up on the partition map but isn't called 'bootstrap')? I /really/ don't want to repartition my hard disk, (and reinstall MacOSX), /again/!
No, partition 1 is always the partition map, which is where the actual partition table is at. I don't think any partitioning tool will let you delete or rename that (certainly shouldn't do so, anyway - that would be bad).
P.S. Are there any good reasons for choosing ext2 filesystems over ext3, or vice versa?
Go with ext3. If the system crashes, or whatever, you don't have to sit and wait while fsck runs on the filesystem.
-- Derrik Pates dpates@dsdk12.net