Subject: G4 yaboot questions
From: Stefan Jeglinski (jeglin@4pi.com)
Date: Mon Nov 06 2000 - 16:00:36 MST
There have been so many questions and answers (many wrong I think)
about using yaboot on a G4 that IMHO all archives are quite
confusing. I'm trying to set up a dual-boot system using the
bootscript, having already installed YDL 1.2 (not 1.2.1, but I'm
using the latest yaboot incarnation from 1.2.1).
I willingly submit to all flames and ask these questions, which IMHO
also are not addressed completely in any official documentation I've
seen. I promise that when I finally figure it out, I will write yet
another how-to that makes sure these are ALL answered in ONE spot! If
someone will kindly answer each one in turn, I'd be very happy:
1. YDL updates says mistakes were made, there should be 4 slashes in
front of vmlinux, not two, in yaboot.conf. Does this 4-slash rule
also apply to the procedure to set OF to select either yaboot or
bootscript (setenv blah blah blah)? And does it also apply to the
bootscript text?
2. All references to the hard drive in the dox I can find use the
terminology "hd". But there have been lots of references in archives
to "ultra0" and even "ultra1". Can I get a definitive statement of
which to use and when and why?
3. In yaboot.conf, "hd:," (that's hd colon comma, no space)
supposedly refers to "the first HFS partition of the first IDE hard
drive." Apparently if I'm not on the first partition, I should be
putting the partition number in thusly: "hd:N," (that's hd colon
partition# comma, no space). True?
4. w.r.t. question 3, both vmlinux and yaboot are on the Mac boot
partition (in the System Folder), so N should always refer to that
Mac boot partition alone, no?
5. w.r.t. question 4, where does the partition for the root device
(/dev/hdXX) come in? Surely it must appear somewhere.
6. In the bootscript, consider the line:
" Booting Yaboot ..." cr " boot hd:,\\yaboot.tbxi" eval
Pending other answers, this line implies that the yaboot binary
must be named exactly yaboot.tbxi, no? That is, does the tbxi refer
only to the file type or does it reflect the exact name of the file?
If the former, I guess I need to make sure the file type is tbxi,
using FileBuddy for example? See also question 7.
7. In the bootscript, consider the line:
" Booting Mac OS ..." cr " boot hd:,\\:tbxi" eval
Here, the tbxi refers strictly to file type, no? The real target
is the ROM, no? ("Mac OS ROM" has type tbxi, but tbxi does not appear
in the name of the ROM file). And since there have been lots of
scattered OFFICIAL blunders (2 slashes instead of 4, or the infamous
"txbi" instead of "tbxi"), is it true that there is -no- colon before
yaboot.tbxi (booting to Linux), but there -is- a colon before tbxi
(booting to MacOS)?
The answer to any one of these questions may bring a "suffer the
fools" response but I really don't care. I think I even know the
answer to a couple of them. But when you're faced with it not working
and you don't know the answers to ALL of the above, the combinatorial
problem you face is practically insurmountable unless you view Linux
as a playtoy, like dice... and I'm really trying hard not to do that.
Stefan Jeglinski
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Mon Nov 06 2000 - 16:00:35 MST