Hello! I had a closer look at the bootloader installation on PowerMacs today and realized that so far we never blessed the bootloader partition on hard disk which is why the installed Debian system never showed up as a selectable icon in the OpenFirmware boot menu. We merely hard-wired the boot path for GRUB in NVRAM.
At the same time, hfsprogs - the original HFS filesystem utilities by Apple - can no longer create HFS filesystem after I updated it to version 543 but only HFS+ filesystems. While NewWorld PowerMacs can actually boot from HFS+ partitions, we're missing a tool in Debian to bless folders on HFS+ partitions. The hattrib utility from the hfsutils package which can bless folders doesn't work with HFS+ filesystems and the hfsplus package doesn't have any hattrib utility (yet). In order to solve this issue, we have a couple of options: - Use HFS instead of HFS+ and use the old hformat utility in grub-installer - Use HFS+ with hfsprogs and port Apple's bless utility to Linux [1] - Use HFS+ with hfsprogs and write a blessing tool based on libisofs [2] I'm not sure whether the libisofs approach would work, but in any case the installation CDs actually use HFS+ and have a blessed system folder which is displayed by the menu in OpenFirmware. Other suggestions? Adrian > [1] https://opensource.apple.com/source/bless/ > [2] https://dev.lovelyhq.com/libburnia/libisofs -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
