Re: A friendly plea for Linux PPC help!
On Mar 15, 2007, at 1:49 AM, Anthony Henson wrote:
Hello there! I realize this is poor netiquitte but I keep seeing
your posts
on the mailing lists, and your set-up seems similar to mine. after
about 20
installs of 3 different distros I finally got my old rev. 1 Beige G3
(2.01fOF, Patched nvram), and finally managed to get Ubuntu installed
and running
great, and the only thing is I'd like is to stop using bootx.
Again, I am
sorry to e-mail you out of the blue like this, but I was just
wondering if
you've had any success with any bootloaders that can be accessed
from Open
Firmware. I'm not looking for detailed instructions, but if you
could point
me in the right direction I would be eternally greatful! Quik?
mIboot? Grub?
Mkvlinuz? Thank you very much for even reading this. I hope all is
well with
you. Take care,
Tony
Hi Tony!
You're most welcome to ask any questions I can answer. If I can't
help, I'll say so. I enjoy helping when I can.
I'm CC-ing this to the Debian-Powerpc mailinglist, incase there's
somebody there who has better advice than I do.
I've never bothered to do it myself (BootX works fine for me, and I
like having OS-9 available when I need it), but I know it's possible
to get Debian to boot with quik.
If I needed to get an Apple-free system, I'd start by booting the
installer from one of Wouter's miboot floppy images at
http://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/powerpc-miboot/
You'll have to follow some links from there, but they should be obvious.
Put a "netinst" or "businesscard" CD in the CD-rom drive.
Boot with the "boot" or "ofonlyboot" floppy. Feed it the "root" and
two driver floppies as it requests. Sometimes, you may have to eject
floppies manually with a paperclip.
Let the install run its course. When it gets to the partitioning
menu, tell it to use the whole disk and do a guided partitioning.
This *should* generate the necessary partition for the "quik"
bootloader to reside in, as well as a "/" partition for Linux to
reside in, and maybe some others that are needed by "quik" (As I say,
I've not done this myself, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact steps.)
When it comes time to install quik, let it.
The installer *should* automatically set the appropriate OF
parameters to make the machine boot into quik. If not, ask back on
the debian-powerpc list and somebody there will probably have the
necessary OF magic at their fingertips. If not, I'll do some
research and see if I can find the web pages from the FreeBSD folks
that explain what they do in this situation.
Hope it works!
Rick
PS: Recently somebody on (I believe it was) the Debian-Powerpc list
described how to create a bootable MacOS-9 CD with BootX and the
necessary tools on it to do OpenFirmware magic etc. Having such a CD
would probably make this whole process a *lot* easier.
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