Having trouble with a New G4 and installing Yellow Dog from CD

[Suzanne Payne]

--On Wednesday, March 5, 2003 1:11 am -0500 Martin Akerman 
<martin@polario.net> wrote:

> Please, somebody help me get this resolved.
> I'm not exactly a Mac Wiz but I am a huge fan of linux.
> Got the mac because it was the most reliable hardware I could find.
> I need to know what I need to disable or get by in order for yaboot to
> take control during startup. The CD does not boot at all.. goes straight
> to OSX.
> Machine is 1GHZ G4.  Jan 2003


Ah...you might well have come up against the "new macs will not boot into 
OS9" problem.

First you need to reformat your drive (I'm assuming you only want YDL?). 
You need to use the OSX installer CD.  Boot onto that (put CD in, reboot 
holding down C) - it'll welcome you to the installer, but ignore that and 
select Disk Utilty (or someething like that) from the menus and 
reformat/partition the drive.  For YDL it must be 'Unallocated' not Macos 
Extended or anything like that.  Then reboot and startup from the YDL CD by 
holding down option-apple-O-F immediatly on reboot, you should be brought 
to the Open Firmware screen.  Type:
boot cd:,\\yaboot
and press enter. You should startup from the YDL CD.  Follow the 
instructions on the YDL site for installing with yaboot.

This certainly works for machines that *will* boot into OS9.  I have no 
idea how yaboot works, but if it still doesn't work on your machine it may 
be because of Apple's change to only OSX boot.

Hope this helps
Suzanne