Re: booting from openfirmware

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2000 at 03:45:46AM -0500, gsteele@MIT.EDU wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was wondering if there is any information out there about booting the
> potato floppies using open-firmware on a powermac?
> 
> I have a UMAX S900 (clone 9500 motherboard) and I would love to install
> debian linux on it. I am able to access the OF prompt through the serial
> port from my intel linux box, but I am not sure how to boot the "rescue" 
> disk.  I found the following in the "bootargs file" and it looks like it
> got close: 
> 
> 0 > setenv boot-device fd:0  ok                                                 
> 0 > setenv boot-file /linux load_ramdisk=1 root=/dev/ram video=keep  ok         
> 0 > boot unrecognized Client Program formatstate not valid                      
>  ok

I am not too familier with that machine's OF, but it looks to me like
it does not support filesystems, AFAIK the only macs that have OF
capable of reading a filesystem is the newworld (colored) ones. (I
assume that the clones just used Apple's current incarnations of OF at
the time rather then make their own)

instead i think what you are supposed to do is dd a coff format kernel
directly to the floppy, and then I think all you would need to change
is removing /linux from the boot-file arguments...  

I am not certain this will work though, unfortunately most
incarnations of OF on powerpc hardware is pretty broken and almost all
have thier own quirks for how you convince them to boot.. It is
possible to do it just takes the right ammount of black magic :)
 
> There is not any info yet in the docs about how to do it. I was planning
> to do an NFS install of the base and then get the rest from the ftp sites,
> after booting from a floppy. Are there any other install methods that
> might work better with my system?

NFS is definitely the way to go, that way you don't have to have an
extra disk or mucked up partitions just so you can keep the huge base
tarball available for install.  the hardest part about installing on
PPC's is the bootstrap..  once you get it installed you need to get
quik running, I am pretty sure it works on clones..

-- 
Ethan Benson