Alternative to yaboot for booting a PPC Linux distro?

[Stefan Bruda]

At 02:53 -0500 on 2003-11-23 Harvey Ussery wrote:
 >
 > I gave it my best shot, but continued to find that yaboot could be
 > configured to boot either Debian or YDL (plus OSX), but not to boot
 > both Deb & YDL.

Did you use the partition attribute?  I did use Yaboot to dual boot
Linux when I migrated my machine from one version to the next and I
did not have problems at all.  What I did was having in
/etc/yaboot.conf something like this:

image=/boot/vmlinux
        partition=11
        label=old
        root=/dev/hda11
        append="hdc=scsi"

image=/boot/vmlinux
        partition=12
        label=new
        root=/dev/hda12
        append="hdc=scsi"

The partition attribute refers to the /boot/vmlinux path.  If you are
like me (and I believe most Linux on PPC users) and do not have a
separate /boot partition, then the partition number should be the same
as the one for your root partition (as in the example above).

You might have a global definition for partition, but since you now
have two of them you should move the definition inside each image
blocks.

Once I did this all I had to do was run ybin and I had a dual Linux
boot in no time.

Hope this helps,
Stefan

-- 
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as
it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass