Alternative to yaboot for booting a PPC Linux distro?

[Harvey Ussery]

Thanks so much, Stefan, for your very helpful reply. [Thanks also again 
to Greg Hamilton, who also helped steer me in working out this config 
problem.] I config'd yaboot.conf along the lines you (and Greg) 
suggested, and I am now indeed able to boot into both ydl - debian - 
macosx (and cdrom). This is the config I used:

boot=/dev/hda2
device=/pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0:
init-message="Welcome to Yellow Dog Linux!\nHit <TAB> for boot options.\n\n"
timeout=300
install=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot
magicboot=/usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot
default=yellowdog

image=/boot/vmlinux-2.4.20-8d
        label=yellowdog
        partition=4
        root=/dev/hda4
        read-only
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.20-8d.img
        append="hdb=ide-scsi"

image=/boot/vmlinux-2.2.20-pmac
        label=debian
        partition=6
        root=/dev/hda6
        read-only
        append="hdb=ide-scsi"

yellowdog=/dev/hda4
debian=/dev/hda6
macosx=/dev/hda3
delay=30
enablecdboot

#Remember to run ybin!!!

Yes, the timeouts are absurdly long, but I wanted time to ponder--will 
reconfig later--and there's probably a bit of overkill in the config, 
but I wanted to be sure! The one thing that surprised me is that I do 
not get all 4 boot options (ydl, deb, macosx and cdrom) at first stage 
boot. At that stage I get only:
Press l for YellowDogLinux
        x for MacOSX
        c for CDRom
Then when I press "l" I get:
"Welcome to YDL! Hit <Tab> for boot options"
When I <Tab> I get:
boot:
*yellowdog       debian
If I then type "debian [Enter]" I boot into Debian.
Is this normal procedure, or could I reconfig so that I get all 4 
options at first stage boot?

Also, can you tell me what the line
append="hdb=ide-scsi"
means? It was entered to yaboot.conf during install, so I left it in 
when I reconfig'd. You have a similar line (append="hdc=scsi") in your 
yaboot.conf. Does it refer to the CDRom drive?

Thanks again.    --Harvey



Stefan Bruda wrote:

>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
>
>  
>