mounting hfs+ partitions in yellowdog, and vice versa

[yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

P.S. to my problems of earlier today. I am trying to create a dual boot
system and accidentally put the mac osx (hfs+) partition ahead of the
linux partition. Everything kinda works but there are some strange
problems. And I want to know if they are caused by the order of the
partitions. i.e will they likely disappear if I start all over (sigh...)
There have been no suggestions yet from you guys on this list,
but I have some more small pieces of evidence to offer:

> Question 1: is it possible to mount hfs+ partitions with YDL
> and is it possible to fix things so that fdisk sees everything?

The debian ppc webpages tell me also that macosx can't see linux and
linux can't see macosx (hfs+) so I guess I can't complain that YDL can't
either. Hopefully someone is working on this (apparently already have,
cf. knoppix-ppc, but it hasn't made it's way into the big distros yet).

> There is one more strange thing, connected to the swap partition.
> Among the start up messages I get:
> Activating swap points       swapon    invalid argument    [FAILED]
> and
> Enabling local file system   swapon    invalid argument    [FAILED]
> I can't find which scripts are being run for this in rc5.d

I found where this comes from in rc.sysinit [if i remember the name
correctly] and figured out that the invalid argument is
"/dev/hda4" itself, the location of the swap space! So somehow the
system is having trouble finding the swap partitions at start-up,
I suppose that is connected to the trouble with fdisk -l ....
And connected to having the partitions in the wrong order????

[First, with the mac os x's disk utily, i had partitioned my hard disk as
30+10 GB, both formatted hfs+; then I put back my mac os on the
first part; then I did the ydl install. None of the easy options
for partitioning (at the start of the ydl install) applied and I had
to use the druid to first delete the 10 GB partition, and then create
the apple bootstrap, swap, and linux partitions in the free-coming space.]

I created a swap space twice as big as my ram, ie 2x640 MB, though
the ydl instruction pdf manual advised a fixed amount independent of
your computer's memory, i think it was 256. On the other hand the
druid who helps you doing partitioning during the install says 2xmemory.
A curious inconsistency.

> Question 4: would everything be solved if I started all over,
> erase and repartition my hard disk, with first YDL and then OS X ...

I'm beginning to believe this would indeed solve some of the problems,
but I'd still like to hear anyone else's advice on this.
Debian's ppc pages also made a point of the order. And also suggested to
create an extra hfs partition (not hfs+ !) for communication between
the two OS's. Good tip (maybe should be included in ydl's documentation).

R.