Post by tortoisePost by Tinkerer AtlargePost by tortoisePost by Tinkerer AtlargeThe Startup Disk preferences pane might not be able to see your Yaboot
partition after you boot from OS X. So, to get back to your internal HD
Linux, you might need to unplug your external drive or hold down the
Option key as you boot up. That should give you the Mac's built-in
OS-picker.
The linux picker has never worked on the macs for me, its there but if
osX is selected startup disk switching from won't work. However switch
to macos will if linux is the set startup.
Do you get icons for the other disks/partitions? I have never had any
problems with my 2003 eMac. It could be dependent on the Open Firmware
version. It also depends on Yaboot being installed in a separate
partition. The openSUSE installation is different, but it should also
work. Admittedly, there are alternative ways of starting Linux, some of
which might leave it invisible to the OS-picker.
Its not invisible, the penguin simply does not boot into linux. But if
penguin is default you may switch to a macos partition. It is just
that if macos is default then you cannot switch to penguin.
Possibly I never tried it. At one stage I had MacOS X and three Linux
distros installed on my internal HD. I could certainly see all the
startup icons. But it is possible I relied on the Yaboot menu to start
them without giving the OS-picker a workout. I was more concerned with
getting FireWire to boot at the time. There were a lot more icons than
disks on my screen. I know at least some of them worked.
Post by tortoiseI always put yaboot on a separate partition at the beginning of the
partitions. That way it can be default if nothing is set.
That is how I also have my own internal HD set up at present, except
mine defaults to Mac. I did a lot of experimenting trying to find the
most robust setup. I never did find one which was 100% foolproof. In the
end I decided that putting Yaboot on Partition 2 and OSX on partition 3
with boot-device set to hd:3 was the best plan.
That way, it continues to seem like a normal Mac to anyone else. Only if
I press the 'd' key during startup will Yaboot (and thence Linux) boot
because Open Firmware then ignores Open Firmware's boot-device paramater
and goes for the first bootable partition on the disk. The reason for
putting OSX on Partition 3 is because that is the Open Firmware default.
That way, if someone resets the pram, it should continue to boot like a
normal Mac. (Or that was my original reasoning. It turns out Open
Firmware ignores its own 'boot-volume' (default = 3) and looks at
'boot-device' only. That means it still needs adjusting after a pram
reset, but all it takes is using Open Firmware setenv to insert a 3
between the default boot parameter's first colon ':' and the comma. You
don't have to remember any more details than that :-)
I suspect if an ordinary Mac user unexpectedly started seeing the
unMaclike yaboot menu, they would think the computer had a virus. They
would probably think it was trying to trick them when it claimed they
have to press 'x' in order for it to behave like a mac :-)
Post by tortoiseI think if a
person already had mac on the first by mistake, the linux partition
tools let you reorder the number logic to make it logically first if
not physically, which is good enough.
That works too. However I found it confuses mac-side Disk Utility into
wrongly calculating the size of the disk, and making a mess of the
partition layout on screen.
Post by tortoisePost by Tinkerer AtlargePost by tortoiseThere is a way to put a menu into yaboot to pick an osX disk as an
alternative. That is how I have mine set up.
It should be in yaboot.conf commented out.
Trying to eliminate the Yaboot menu (but not Yaboot itself) became one
of my goals.
One problem with the above system is that each new Linux distro alters
nvram's 'boot-device' setting. Once you have everything working you can
insert 'nonvram' in yaboot.conf and re-run ybin after you have restored
and readjusted nvram, hopefully for the final time :-)
However the above scheme does solve the problem of people messing things
up by changing Startup Disk preferences. Because Startup Disk only
displays Mac partitions, the user can only select Mac partitions, and
can use Startup Disk from one of the other Mac partitions to revert to
the original boot partition themselves if required :-)
Post by tortoisePost by Tinkerer AtlargeWhen external Linux is not the default, you can also get it to boot by
holding down Cmd-Opt-Shift-Delete during boot-up. You need to make sure
there are no bootable media in the CDROM drive and, maybe, no other
external storage devices plugged in. Yaboot needs to be the first
bootable partition on the external drive. Also, not all Linux
installations are configured to boot via FireWire. I was able to get
external Debian to work, but not openSUSE.
Yes thanks for the reminder. As far as external booting, configured
maybe means in the kernel ? Driver must be "y" not "m" to be in
kernel... still umm if OF sees /dev/sda there is some support....
I'm not sure what the problem was. I could get openSUSE to install on
the FireWire disk ok, but during startup the kernel seemed unable to
identify the sda partition I gave it as 'root' parameter. I tried
removing all other external storage devices, thinking that maybe what
started out as 'sda' might have got re-designated 'sdb' somewhere along
the way, but it made no difference.
However Debian installed successfully on FireWire, proving it is
possible. Once debian was installed, it would also boot without problems
on any other eMac I plugged the drive into.