Booting from a CD-ROM
&boot-installer-intro-cd.xml;
Currently, the only &arch-title; subarchitectures that support CD-ROM
booting are PReP (though not all systems) and New World PowerMacs.
On PowerMacs, hold the c key, or else the combination of
Command, Option,
Shift, and Delete
keys together while booting to boot from the CD-ROM.
OldWorld PowerMacs will not boot a Debian CD, because OldWorld
computers relied on a Mac OS ROM CD boot driver to be present on the CD,
and a free-software version of this driver is not available. All
OldWorld systems have floppy drives, so use the floppy drive to launch
the installer, and then point the installer to the CD for the needed
files.
If your system doesn't boot directly from CD-ROM, you can still use
the CD-ROM to install the system. On NewWorlds, you can also use an
OpenFirmware command to boot from the CD-ROM manually. Follow the
instructions in for booting from
the hard disk, except use the path to yaboot on the
CD at the OF prompt, such as
0 > boot cd:,\install\yaboot
Booting from Hard Disk
&boot-installer-intro-hd.xml;
Booting CHRP from OpenFirmware
Not yet written.
Booting OldWorld PowerMacs from MacOS
If you set up BootX in , you can
use it to boot into the installation system. Double click the
BootX application icon. Click on the
Options button and select Use
Specified RAM Disk. This will give you the
chance to select the ramdisk.image.gz file. You
may need to select the No Video Driver checkbox,
depending on your hardware. Then click the
Linux button to shut down MacOS and launch the
installer.
Booting NewWorld Macs from OpenFirmware
You will have already placed the vmlinux,
initrd.gz, yaboot, and
yaboot.conf files at the root level of your HFS
partition in .
Restart the computer, and immediately (during the chime) hold down the
Option, Command (cloverleaf/Apple),
o, and f keys all together. After
a few seconds you will be presented with the Open Firmware prompt.
At the prompt, type
0 > boot hd:x,yaboot
replacing x with the partition number of
the HFS partition where the
kernel and yaboot files were placed, followed by a &enterkey;. On some
machines, you may need to use ide0: instead of
hd:. In a few more seconds you will see a
yaboot prompt
boot:
At yaboot's boot: prompt, type either
install or install video=ofonly
followed by a &enterkey;. The
video=ofonly argument is for maximum
compatibility; you can try it if install
doesn't work. The Debian installation program should start.
Booting from USB memory stick
Currently, NewWorld PowerMac systems are known to support USB booting.
Make sure you have prepared everything from . To boot a Macintosh system from a USB stick,
you will need to use the Open Firmware prompt, since Open Firmware does
not search USB storage devices by default.
To get to the prompt, hold down
Command Option
o f all together while
booting (see ).
You will need to work out where the USB storage device appears in the
device tree, since at the moment ofpath cannot work
that out automatically. Type dev / ls and
devalias at the Open Firmware prompt to get a
list of all known devices and device aliases. On the author's system
with various types of USB stick, paths such as
usb0/disk, usb0/hub/disk,
/pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1, and
/pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/hub@1/disk@1 work.
Having worked out the device path, use a command like this to boot the
installer:
boot usb0/disk:2,\\:tbxi
The 2 matches the Apple_HFS or
Apple_Bootstrap partition onto which you copied the boot image earlier,
and the ,\\:tbxi part instructs Open Firmware to
boot from the file with an HFS file type of "tbxi" (i.e.
yaboot) in the directory previously blessed with
hattrib -b.
The system should now boot up, and you should be presented with the
boot: prompt. Here you can enter optional boot
arguments, or just hit &enterkey;.
This boot method is new, and may be difficult to get to work on some
NewWorld systems. If you have problems, please file an installation
report, as explained in .
Booting with TFTP
&boot-installer-intro-net.xml;
Currently, PReP and New World PowerMac systems support netbooting.
On machines with Open Firmware, such as NewWorld Power Macs, enter the
boot monitor (see ) and
use the command boot enet:0. PReP and CHRP boxes
may have different ways of addressing the network. On a PReP machine,
you should try
boot net:server_ipaddr,file,client_ipaddr.
On some PReP systems (e.g. Motorola PowerStack machines) the command
help boot may give a description of syntax and
available options.
Booting from Floppies
Booting from floppies is supported for &arch-title;, although it is
generally only applicable for OldWorld systems. NewWorld systems are
not equipped with floppy drives, and attached USB floppy drives are
not supported for booting.
You will have already downloaded the floppy images you needed and
created floppies from the images in .
To boot from the boot-floppy-hfs.img floppy,
place it in floppy drive after shutting the system down, and before
pressing the power-on button.
For those not familiar with Macintosh
floppy operations: a floppy placed in the machine prior to boot will
be the first priority for the system to boot from. A floppy without a
valid boot system will be ejected, and the machine will then check for
bootable hard disk partitions.
After booting, the root.bin floppy is
requested. Insert the root floppy and press &enterkey;. The installer
program is automatically launched after the root system has been
loaded into memory.
PowerPC Boot Parameters
Many older Apple monitors used a 640x480 67Hz mode. If your video
appears skewed on an older Apple monitor, try appending the boot
argument video=atyfb:vmode:6 , which will
select that mode for most Mach64 and Rage video hardware. For Rage 128
hardware, this changes to
video=aty128fb:vmode:6 .