I've begun the adventure of bootstrapping debian/ppc onto my
new G4. Since I do not have a zip disk handy, and I do have
a yellowdog CD, I thought the best way to go about this would
be to leverage the yellowdog's convenient mac-fdisk to make
the 800K Apple_Bootstrap partition that Ethan advocates.
I managed to get the yaboot_0.4 package to work to get into
the yellowdog installation routines to partition my disk.
I made a partition of type Apple_HFS at the end of the disk
to put MacOS on. Fortunately, the partitioning worked fine
when I did this. MacOS is reinstalled, and my Apple_Bootstrap
partition is waiting there for me to try Ethan's cool ybin
tool on it.
Here's where I'm stuck: In order to run ybin, I have to get
linux started again. Unfortunately, I think that I may have
broken yaboot_0.4 by placing the MacOS partition towards the
end of my disk. In Open Firmware, it complains:
boot: hd:yaboot_0.4
Can't open config file, err: -2
It had no trouble reading this configuration file before.
I thought to try the most recent yaboot_0.5, but open firmware
claims to not be able to yaboot_0.5 executable at all:
boot: hd:yaboot_0.5
Can't open hd:yaboot_0.5
(So it looks like yaboot_0.4 had better luck.)
Now, the difference between these to yaboot executables is that
version 0.4 came in a stuffit bundle from yellowdoglinux.com,
whereas version 0.5 came gzipped from Benjamin's page.
On my linux/intel box, they are identified slightly differently.
Could it be that being stripped causes yaboot_0.5 to fail
to load? It wouldn't make sense to me, but that's the only difference
I can see.
Also, does anybody happen to know what an error code of -2
implies in 0.4?
$ file yaboot_0.5
yaboot_0.5: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, PowerPC or cisco 4500,
version 1, statically linked, stripped
$ file yaboot_0.4
yaboot_0.4: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, PowerPC or cisco 4500,
version 1, statically linked, not stripped
$ ls -l yaboot*
-rw-r--r-- 1 pohl pohl 146804 Feb 28 20:15 yaboot_0.4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 pohl pohl 53832 Feb 27 20:00 yaboot_0.5
Now, just in case anybody is wondering whether or not I'm
correctly referencing the right partition when I try to start
yaboot from Open Firmware, I've tried referencing the numerical
partition directly, with the same results. I've verified that
I've counted the partitions correctly by booting MacOS from
OF with like this...
boot hd:9,\\:tbxi
