Stupid question number eleventy seven... is boot camp required? I tried booting a someone recent i386 CD by holding down the C key while powering on and got to the OpenBSD cd boot -- where the system seemed to hang. Guess: it needs a keyboard, doesn't recognize the USB keyboard, I need boot camp.
Ah, yes, booting from CD. Maybe I was really a little bit lucky with that because it worked quite well here right from the beginning. ;-) Boot Camp: No, it's not required, it works fine with a usual OpenBSD-only configured internal harddisk, at least with Boot-ROM-Version MM11.0055.B05 and Boot-ROM-Version MM11.0055.B08. Of course you can only upgrade if you install a minimal OS X... :-/ (maybe it's sufficient if you install that on an external firewire harddisk and boot from there, I didn't test that for the Boot-ROM upgrade). Latest Boot-ROM-Version here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macminiefifirmwareupdate11.html Some recent CD: The 4.0 release CD and snapshots from Nov. 12, 2006 or later should boot fine, a few snapshots between that didn't work. You don't need a -current boot CD to install a -current (or snapshot) file set.
Guess: it needs a keyboard, doesn't recognize the USB keyboard, I need boot camp.
Yeah, keyboard. The lucky part for me. I found out later that an USB keyboard won't work without an ACPI kernel, so it doesn't work just with an usual OpenBSD boot CD. Afaik Boot Camp doesn't help you at all here. But if you've paired a wireless bluetooth keyboard with the mini while OS X was still installed, what I did by accident, it'll work also perfectly while installing OpenBSD. I don't think there's a way to do the bluetooth pairing just with OpenBSD. And btw one more tip for headless servers: The mini doesn't feel like booting without a monitor connected (no matter if switched on or off) as long as there's no OS X on the harddisk. But fortunately there's a hardware fix to convince the mini that there's a (non-DDC) monitor attached: A 75 ohm resistor (100 ohm works also) as load between pin 2 and pin 7 of a 15 pin highdensity D-SUB male connector (with DVI to VGA adapter) or between pin C2 and C5 of a 29 pin DVI male connector as a dongle for the DVI/VGA port (that's between analog green and analog ground, 75 ohm is the standard load for that output pin). Just plug in the dongle and the mini will boot happily also without a monitor. :-) There seem to be no software fix for this problem. Tas.
