On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 06:06:41PM -0800, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> >
> > where /dev/sda2 is your root partition. Perform this step after
> > running Make-Linux-Bootable-Directly-From-Hard-Disk.
>
> um, root partition or boot partition?
root partition. /boot partitions are a bad idea in general on powerpc
(and unecessary) bootstrap partitions as in newworld setups are not
usable on oldworld.
you can also use partition 0
nvsetev boot-device "$(ofpath /dev/sda)0"
like that.
> Perhaps it can be said too much, however. You may have missed the spot where I mentioned that I had read the install docs
> backwards and forwards, and many other sources of info floating around the web just to figure out what the heck a .sit file
> is. But I did also read the part where it says that the 'ofpath' command doesn't work if you booted with BootX, and that
> appears to be true on my machine when I tried it. So I am not able to make use of the above instructions. It's sort of a
> chicken and egg thing.
ofpath only breaks with bootx on newworld systems.
as for .sit Apple has been shipping a desitter with the OS for years
now, but i do agree that archiving on macos is a horrid mess.
> As for the idea that the installation procedure did something to install quik, but that something isn't effective until you do
> something else that's documented in the installation docs, it still isn't a good reason to leave a somewhat misleading
> exchange in the installation process. It could just as easily mention after it's finished installing quik that the user now
> needs to consult the docs to finish the job. For a person like me, I might have taken a week to fully read the installation
talk to the boot floppies maintainers about this, im not one of them.
dbootstrap could use ofpath and nvsetenv to set the boot-device
variable as part of the quik install process. thats half the reason i
bothered to put oldworld support in ofpath in the first place.
however the debian boot-floppies code is well a mess, there is no
other way to say it, so i understand the logic behind not screwing
with that pile of spaghetti code any more then necessary for a stable
update. i do seriously hope that make-bootable-from-disk will be
fixed to take care of the nvsetenv task on quik setup and setup
ybin/yaboot on newworlds for woody. (i am not good enough at C to
attempt to fix it myself)
woody will probably be the last to use this boot-floppies code,
debian-installer (the complete from scratch rewrite of boot-floppies)
should make building proper bootloader setups much simpler.
unfortuantly it doesn't look like debian-installer will be ready in
time.
> docs, as a background task, and may not remember every word by the time I finally get the system to boot into Linux so I can
> even do the install, so the more helpful the messages that pop up, the better, if anyone is asking me. Some of the more
> complicated parts might be hard to remember at all if you have no idea what they are talking about, for instance, if you've
> never heard of quik or yaboot or BootX or "OpenFirmware device paths" before. OK, so I was already familiar with OF, but you
> get my drift.
documentation does need to be improved, but this is a volunteer
effort. when you see holes volunteering to help is the best approach
to getting them fixed.
> I'm skeptical that it actually did install quik on my system, but I won't know until I get the following question answered:
>
> I don't know which partition to specify as the boot partition when running ybin/quik. On the original MacOS disk, there are 5
> partitions:
>
> part1: the partition map
apple partition tables have the peculiar property that the partition
table itself *is* a partition.
> part2: Apple_Driver43 (or something close to that -- 32KB in size, if memory serves)
> part3: Apple_Driver43 (part duex? this one is 128KB in size, if I remember right)
> part4: Apple_patches (don't remember the size, but less than 1MB, I think)
macos cruft. required for macos to boot. (but not quik or any other
OF bootloader)
> part5: Apple_HFS whatever, the main partition with MacOS installed on it.
you macos partition of course.
> So, what does it all mean? ~:^) There is no Apple_Boot partition, I'm guessing that this is another benefit of trying to
Apple_Bootstrap partitions are only needed on Newworlds because
Newworld OpenFirmware is broken in that it won't load a bootblock.
Oldworld OF will load the first 2 blocks from any partition, so the
quik first stage loader is installed in the bootblock of your ext2fs
root partition (ext2fs like most filesystems leaves 2 512 byte blocks
empty at the start of the partition to leave room for a bootloader)
> reuse wicked obsolete hardware ~:^) I'm used to jumping through hoops to get old hardware working, now if I can just figure
> out which hoop to jump through. I installed Potato on a second disk, and I left myself a 65MB partition on that disk with
> type Apple_Boot, but haven't quite figured out how to switch over completely to that disk. [I am thinking of changing the
> SCSI id's on the two disks so that the linux disk is ends up sda instead of sdb, and I'm hoping that the Apple ROM will be
> nice enough to notice that the first disk isn't bootable but the second is, and then I can run ybin and remove the MacOS drive
> w/o any problems.] Right now I'm afraid to run ybin/quik and specify any of the Apple_{Driver,patches} partitions as the boot
> partition for fear that [I don't know what I'm doing and] I'll hose the MacOS disk and then I will be completely screwed.
ybin won't do you any good on oldworld as its purpose is to install
yaboot, which is newworld only (ybin should warn when run on oldworlds
that the bootstrap installed won't boot)
quik should automatically install the bootblock on your root partition
unless you have something wierd like a /boot partition separate from /
(not recommended)
you need a quik.conf first:
partition=6 ## your root partition
root=/dev/sda6 ## your root partition
image=/boot/vmlinux-2.2.18pre21 ## your kernel, don't use a symlink it might not work
label=Linux
read-only
then run /sbin/quik no arguments are needed.
> Cheers,
>
> a
>
> PS. Three hoorahs for Debian Potato supporting PPC. I now have the ability to make excellent use of this machine, which was
> serving as a door stop before this, and the only thing which isn't perfect is the current booting procedure, but even if I can
> never remove the MacOS disk and always have to boot MacOS first, that would hardly be the end of the world, since Linux has
> yet to crash on this machine. It makes a fine web applications server for very lite web apps. As long as there are no
> graphics to render or quadratic equations to solve .... ~:^)
quik can usually be made to work. one other option that you could
look into is miboot, but its fickle, hard to configure/maintain and is
undocumented. its not made to be a general purpose bootloader but
made for bootfloppies.
miboot however requires the proprietary Apple disk drivers (all those
Apple_Driver partitions)
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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