Re: usb support
> p.s. I'm using bootx, which is not recommended for new-worlds, but I don't
> know what else to use, and i'm not at all sure that that's the problem.
This could account for it. I had to use yaboot when installing
on my G4.
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
I had a zip drive to boot off of, which was very helpful.
The steps went something like this:
1) HFS format a zip disk
2) On the zip disk, place the yaboot binary, a suitable
yaboot.conf file, a kernel, and the installation boot
image. In my case, the files were
yaboot
yaboot.conf
vmlinux-2.2.15pre14-ben1
ramdisk.image.gz
Ugh, I've been racking my brain to remember exactly what
the yaboot.conf file looked like, but can't off the top of
my head.
3) While the machine is booting, press CTRL-APPLE-O-F to
get into the open firmware prompt.
4) Once you're in the open firmware prompt, type
boot zip:yaboot
where "yaboot" is the name you saved the yaboot binary as,
which was, at one time, "yaboot_0.6" in my case.
This will start the installation process. Yaboot is also
the bootloader you want to use to boot into linux after
you're done with the installation. At first I modified
my yaboot.conf file on the zip disk to boot from my hard
drive. This gave me time to figure out getting yaboot
written to the Apple_Bootstrap partition.
I used the mac-fdisk program (from within the debian installer)
to make an 800K partition (1600 blocks) called "yaboot" of
type "Apple_Bootstrap". The name of the partition doesn't matter,
but the type does: it keeps Apple's disk partitioning tools
from clobbering your yaboot partition. I placed this partition
after all the Apple_Driver_* and Apple_Patches partitions.
Here's my partition table for inspiration:
# type name length base
/dev/hda1 Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
/dev/hda2 Apple_Driver43 Macintosh 54 @ 64
/dev/hda3 Apple_Driver43 Macintosh 74 @ 118
/dev/hda4 Apple_Driver_ATA Macintosh 54 @ 192
/dev/hda5 Apple_Driver_ATA Macintosh 74 @ 246
/dev/hda6 Apple_FWDriver Macintosh 200 @ 320
/dev/hda7 Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh 512 @ 520
/dev/hda8 Apple_Patches Patch Partition 512 @ 1032
/dev/hda9 Apple_Bootstrap yaboot 1600 @ 1544
/dev/hda10 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 one 2589353 @ 3144
/dev/hda11 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 two 2097152 @ 2592497
/dev/hda12 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap 260069 @ 4689649
/dev/hda13 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 three 11580065 @ 4949718
/dev/hda14 Apple_HFS untitled 3 3536457 @ 16529783
/dev/hda15 Apple_Free Extra 11 @ 20066240
Once the installation was over with, getting yaboot written to
its partition took some playing. There's a program called
"ybin" that does this job for you. Incidentally, there's an
alternate name under which you invoke "ybin", called "mkofboot".
Invoking it this way causes the bootstrap partition to be freshly
formatted (HFS). You have to do this the first time you run ybin.
Running it this way also helps to make sure an old configuration
is properly overwritten.
There were a couple of deb packages that I needed that were
NOT on the installation CD. You see, the ybin program needs to
run a program called "nvsetenv" in order to make OpenFirmware
boot off of the yaboot partition automagically -- but it needed
to be a more recent version of nvsetenv than was in potato when
it was released. You can get it by installing
http://screaming.org/~pohl/powerpc-utils_1.1.3-2_powerpc.deb
Someone else may have a more recent version. This was the one that
got me going.
----
pohl@screaming.org
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