headless dual boot

[Clinton MacDonald]

Mr. DeVita:

I am sorry, but you will not see an answer to your problem in my 
garglings below. :-( But, maybe it will help you think of an answer on 
your own.

Jason DeVita wrote:
> A friend wants to install YDL on a mac. It has no monitor, it's basically
> used as a server. So the question is, how would she choose which OS to
> boot (since she would be rebooting remotely)?

How often is the machine rebooted? I wonder if the best solution would 
be to leave a monitor dongle on the Mac, and carry to it a spare (and 
lightweight, one would hope) monitor for these occasions.

Older Macs (680x0 and early PowerMacs) could not be booted at all 
without a monitor; I am not as certain about modern ("new World") Macs. 
These older machines could be booted headless only by attaching a dongle 
to the monitor port -- almost not worth the effort. Should that still be 
the case with newer Macs, your  question would be moot, and you would 
have to stick a monitor on the machine.

> One idea I came up with, is
> to write a script that modifies yaboot.conf, runs ybin, then reboots.

Oooh. Very clever. I don't know anything about yaboot (I use BootX), but 
that sounds like a cool idea.

> That works fine for changing from linux to OSX; but then she's stuck --
> there's no way to get back.

There are many ways of scripting most things in Mac OS X, but 
OpenFirmware parameters might not be among them. AppleScript (for a 
double-clickable front end) can call perl, python, or bash scripts. Is 
yaboot or ybin "visible" from the Mac OS X side?

> Another idea is to set the timeout in yaboot
> to something long, and attach a keyboard to the machine. Then she could
> just hit 'l' or 'x' after a sufficiently long time. That's kind of
> unsatisfactory, though.

Also very clever. *Some* newer machines can be coerced to boot into OS X 
by holding down the "x" key during boot. Otherwise, one can see the Mac 
OS boot partitions by holding down the option key during boot. The 
latter requires a mouse click (and therefore a monitor) to select the 
partition, however. Maybe you can make YDL the default unless one of 
those modifier keys are pressed (again, I have never used yaboot, so 
that might be impossible).

Good luck!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>