On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 05:10:17PM -0400, Michael D. Crawford wrote:
> I have one of the recently released iBook 700MHz laptops and would like to try
> running linux on it at some point.
>
> But I don't want to partition my disk and reinstall everything, what I would
> like to do is use an external firewire drive and install Linux on that.
>
> Can the iBook boot off a firewire drive?
Yes it can.
> Can Linux load this way (using one of the available boot loaders).
"Load", yes, boot, not quite. yaboot will happy run from the fw drive,
loading the kernel and everything. The problem comes into play when Linux
goes looking for it's root partition. IIRC the kernel doesn't actually fire
off the processes that would detect and activate the firewire drive until
after the root is mounted. Either that or the detection and setup doesn't
complete before it tries to mount.
Either way it should be posible to do it with a small initrd that just
waits for the FW drive to be activated, mounts it as /, then sets the boot
occations but have never actually gotten it to work. Or rather, I've yet to
actually build the initrd. I've booted from my iBook in target mode on a
QuickSilver G4. As I said, the kernel loads and runs just fine, then it
stops when /dev/sda10 doesn't exist yet.
> How would I go about starting up into Linux? Can I set this as my startup
> disk
> in Mac OS X and restart? Or would I have to go into OS 9 and use BootX?
Startup Disk doesn't see my yaboot partition, no big loss though. Just use
the "option" boot menu (Hold down the option key when you power on) to pick
Linux.
> Thanks,
Let me know if you have any luck. There are a few people in town here who
would be interested in a working setup.
- Nick Lopez
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