Alternative to yaboot for booting a PPC Linux distro?

[Stefan Bruda]

At 20:05 -0500 on 2003-11-24 Harvey Ussery wrote:
 >
 > there's probably a bit of overkill in the config, but I wanted to
 > be sure!

It should not matter that much, the whole Yaboot stuff is used once
upon boot.

 > 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?

It is normal procedure, the stage 2 boot deals with all the Linuces
(and is guided by the image= sections).  True, it is kind of strange
to be welcomed to YDL only, but you can change this by changing the
init-message attribute to your favoutite greeting.

My yaboot by the way just says "Press l for Linux," but I don't
remember how I did it.

 > 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?

Yes, to the CD-writer actually.  CD-writers work in Linux through SCSI
emulation, because there is no Linux ATAPI driver for burning CDs.
The line in discusion instructs the kernel to pass the CD-writer (a
Combo drive in my case) to the SCSI emulation sub-system instead of
treating it as a normal ATAPI device.

As for whether it's ide-scsi or just scsi, well, I am not sure, in the
past different kernels I tried asked for different parameters, and now
it would look like recent kernels are happy with both (though I am not
quite sure).

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