Hi Riccardo,
On 10/13/2017 02:05 AM, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
Hi,
after all this discussion about yaboot vs. grub and people having
reported issues on older macs, I can offer my take. I have a G3 PowerPC
iBook? I really do not want to reinstall everything, it takes time to
setup this machine.
What Debian version have you installed currently?
I booted a B&W G3 with GRUB from Debian Sid fine (see [1]), I only later
had problems with the FS, but I'm unsure if they were due to the G3's
bugged ATA controller or already existing FS errors. Hence I assume it
should also work for your G3 iBook.
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/10/msg00006.html
I am using yaboot and everything works fine, very nice machine I do
love. I would be willing to test GRUB to see if my machine works, as I
hope.
I wonder if there is a safe way to try out given my setup?
If you just want to find out if GRUB works for your G3 iBook you can
follow the next steps:
Do you have another G3 or better a fast G4 machine? Then you can install
Debian Jessie on it and upgrade to Sid and then build a GRUB image (see
[2] for a manual installation where you have full control of all steps;
make sure to remove the `serial_ieee1275/scca` parts, these were used to
make use of the Xserve G4's serial console; also adapt the settings in
the GRUB configs, as your root FS containing `/boot` is on a different
partition than during my case: "apple3" => "apple4" and "/dev/sda3" =>
/dev/sda4" I assume) and copy it over to the HFS partition (NewWorld
boot partition) on your G3 iBook - you can simply mount it and then use
`cp`. You can boot the GRUB image from OF with `boot hd:2,grub.img`.
[2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/10/msg00005.html
Please tell me how to and if in case of test there is a safe way of
getting back to yaboot.
The described method doesn't change anything for yaboot, it should still
boot automatically afterwards.
I'm not attached to yaboot, actually a grub, on x86, proves to be easier
since it can have several old kernels, while yaboot is harder with that.
Do I need to resize my partitions? can I safely?
During my tests, the produced GRUB image fitted on a small 800 KB HFS
partition together with yaboot only just, so should also work for your
case (with 1 MB HFS part.) without resizing.
Cheers,
Frank
