miboot on a 6400

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 17:38:23 +0200

> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:14:48 +0300
> Subject: Re: miboot on a 6400
> From: nathan <nathan@incirlik.net>
> To: "yellowdog general lists.terrasoftsolutions.com" 
> <yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com>
> Reply-To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>
>
>
>   AFAIK, miBoot is really hard to get to work on the PPC/Performa 
> machines.

Not really ;) - All my OldWorld Macs (5 in total) boot through it, even 
my beige G3 and my Performa 5200 :)

> Why not get a copy of BootX 1.2.x. In my experience it's the easiest to
> setup and use on the oldworld machines...

Some people like their machines to be Mac OS free to save some disk 
space and to avoid licence issues ;)

Hi sadfsdf,

> My directory tree for the miboot partition is like this
> |-- System Folder (note: Mac OS has blessed the folder)
> |   |-- Finder
> |   |-- System
> |   |-- boot.conf
> |-- Linux Kernels
> |   |-- vmlinux-2.4.22-2f
> |   |-- vmlinux-2.24.22-2fBOOT
> |-- ramdisk.image.gz
> |-- boot.conf

You have _two_ boot.conf files! Use one or the other - I assume miboot 
gets confused which one to use. I usually erase the one in the System 
Folder and use one at the root level of the HFS partition. It is easier 
to manage from the Linux side then, as you avoid the space in the 
"System Folder" in its path, which can cause some problems when using 
the command line.

> My boot.conf is thus:
>
> init-message = "\n Welcome to YDL!\Press <TAB> for boot options.\n\n"
> timeout = 50
>
> default = bootYDL
>
> image = vmlinux-2.4.22-2f
> label = bootYDL
> root = /dev/hda6
> append = "video=valkyriefb3:vmode:14,cmode:8"
>
> image = vmlinux-2.4.22-2fBOOT
> label = install_YDL
> initrd = ramdisk.image.gz
> initrd-size=16384
> root = /dev/ram0
> append = "video=valkyriefb3:vmode:14,cmode:8 text"

Have you tried without any append = "video=..." line? It should work 
without that line. It will usually use 640x480 then, or the settings 
which have been left in the PRAM from the last time you had booted into 
Mac OS. 640x480 is enough to run the installer, after that you can try 
several commands (fbset, nvvideo | read the man pages of those two) to 
tweak video settings and find out about your graphics chip by 
consulting /var/log/dmesg. Also, as already pointed out by another 
poster, the video line should only read valkyriefb and not valkyriefb3, 
in case the machine does have a valkyrie chipset.

Do you get a boot-screen with a landscape and TUX? If so, at least some 
part of miboot has loaded successfully. Increase the "timeout = 50" to 
"timeout = 100" so you'll have 10 secs of boot delay. This should 
suffice in most cases to get the monitor warmed up and to display the 
initial boot screen. Hitting the space bar during that first boot scree 
will get you into a boot menue.

Your problem might also be, that miboot ignores the "default = bootYDL" 
line and will always boot the first set of entries in boot.conf after 
the timeout, which in your case would be the attempt to boot an 
installation that isn't there as of yet (or did you allready get YDL 
installed). From within the boot menue, you will be able to choose from 
your presets in boot.conf and customly add append parameters. After 
installation, put your preferred set of parameters as the first set 
into boot.conf, then automatic boot will start after the timeout 
period.

Also, "root = /dev/hda6" seems a too early partition to hold a linux fs 
to me, as I assume you also have your mibbot partition on the same 
drive. A typical Mac partitioned drive looks as follows:

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/sda'
  #:                type name             length   base    ( size )
  1: Apple_partition_map Apple                63 @ 1
  2:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh            54 @ 64
  3:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh            74 @ 118
  4:  Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh           512 @ 192
  5:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition     512 @ 704
  6:           Apple_HFS "Boot_Linux"     204800 @ 1216    (100.0M)
  7:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap             524288 @ 206016  (256.0M)
  8:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 backup          3448560 @ 730304  (  1.6G)
  9:          Apple_Free Extra                10 @ 4178864

The the earliest partition, in my above example, to hold a Linux fs 
would be partition 7 and onwards. The root=... line specifies the 
partition which holds the file system that is mounted on / under Linux, 
_not_ the partition that holds the miboot loader. My example shows a 
drive that I only use to boot, hold my secondary swap space and a 
backup partition, as my Linux installation is on an IDE drive attached 
to an IDE controller (Promise Ultra 100 TX2), that is only visible to 
the Linux kernel, but not to the Mac (a PM 7500/100) itself. So I am 
forced to use a SCSI disk to hold my miboot partition.

I hope that helps and "un-hardens" the use of miboot on a PPC/Performa.

BTW, the Performa 6400 is a PCI machine, isn't it? If it is still a 
NuBus architecture machine, you need a different kernel. The kernels 
supplied on the YDL CDs won't work on a NuBus type machine. In that 
case, go to http://nubus-pmac.sf.net to get a kernel. You won't be able 
to follow the "normal" installation procedure though. Feel free to 
contact me in that case. I managed to get YDL-3.0 installed on my 
Performa 5200 from scratch. It needs some tricks though.

Greetings,
Alex

Alexander Holst
Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences
<holst [at] fh-pforzheim [dot] de>
ph: +49 [0]7231 28-6837
fx: +49 [0]7231 28-6040