On Thu, Apr 06, 2000 at 10:37:52PM -0400, Nelson Abramson wrote:
> Brendan J Simon wrote:
>
> > OK this all sounds great, but I don't have any machines running Linux/PPC (I assume
> > yaboot/ybin requires Linux/PPC but I might be mistaken).
>
> yaboot is a small program to ease the interaction w/ OF, taking care of all of the
> complicated and difficult parts (well, err, atleast cutting them down). It is
> independent of the distro.
>
> > Can I create this boot zip disk from an i386 linux machine or MacOS ?
>
> You will want to create the boot disk from w/in linux, as ybin (the easiest tool) is a
> ppc linux binary.
well technically its a shell script ;-) ybin works fine on i386
machines i actually do most testing on my intel box installing yaboot
onto a floppy disk so i don't render my ppc unbootable if i add a bug
;-)
> > I'd prefer i386 linux as I do not want to install MacOS and waste the extra disk
> > space.
>
> All you need to do is literally put yaboot (ungziped) and a yaboot.conf (plain text
> configuration file) with a kernel and the necessary install files (base.tgz, etc) on
> the zip. You will have to create the yaboot.conf file correctly. Other than that,
> you just boot into the OF prompt, start yaboot, and you're all set. The boot disk is
> merely an ease of use thing, you can easily manually start yaboot each boot.... (SuSE
> has a neat OF installation package, but it's a macos disk image...)
>
> There is a lot of yaboot/OF instruction and example yaboot.conf files on the list
> archives (linuxppc-user is probably the one w/ the most...but that's just a guess)
device=zip:
timeout=50
image=vmlinux
label=debian
partition=2
initrd=root1440.bin
initrd-size=8192
read-only
you do need to have the zip partitioned with apple partition tables,
yaboot will not work with dos partition tables, and i don't think it
works if there is no table at all.
unfortunatly mac-fdisk does not appear to be available for i386 (no
idea why) you can compile it yourself though.
if you wanted to make the zip bootable without messing with OF
(assuming you have already deleted macos) run the following command:
ybin -C /dev/null -c yaboot.conf --boot /dev/hdc2 -i yaboot --magicboot ofboot.b
replace /dev/hdc2 with the correct device for the first partition.
(the partition table is considered a partition too, so its really the
second partition)
that should allow you to stick the zip disk in and boot the thing
(assuming you deleted macos) if not run:
boot zip:,\\:tbxi
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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