multibooting ppc with Mac OS 9 & X on an ancient iBook

[Joel Rees]

On Aug 26, 2008, at 12:12 PM, Craig White wrote:

> On Mon, 2008-08-25 at 15:24 +0900, Joel Rees wrote:
>> (Giving a little more detail:)
>>
>> On Aug 23, 2008, at 12:07 PM, Craig White wrote:
>
>> Actually, I pre-partitioned the yaboot partition and the Linux big
>> partition with the Mac OS X utility, as well. And the Mac OS 9  
>> utility.
> ----
> I had hoped that someone with experience with multi-boot on Macintosh
> would have piped in because I lack this experience myself but I got  
> the
> impression that the Fedora installer created the yaboot partition  
> itself
> but I may have just let it.

When you let it do the automatic setup it does.

But Anaconda still isn't able to use it on my iBook.

> looking at a Mac with Fedora 8 installed, the anaconda-ks.cfg  
> reports...
> #clearpart --all --initlabel --drives=hda
> #part appleboot --fstype "Apple Bootstrap" --size=1 --ondisk=hda
> #part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=hda
> #part / --fstype ext3 --size=1 --grow --ondisk=hda
> #part swap --size=256 --grow --maxsize=512 --ondisk=hda
>
> So evidently, I must have allowed the druid to create the  
> partitions but
> note that anaconda on a ppc permits an fstype of 'Apple Bootstrap' so
> yeah, if you are gonna install multi-boot, you gotta have 1 mb  
> partition
> designated for it.
>
> this may be useful (apparently you can't use fdisk on an Apple system)
> # parted -l
> Model: Maxtor 6Y080L0 (ide)
> Disk /dev/hda: 82.0GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: mac
>
> Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name      Flags
>  1      512B    32.8kB  32.3kB               Apple
>  2      32.8kB  1081kB  1049kB  hfs          untitled  boot
>  3      1081kB  106MB   105MB   ext3         untitled
>  4      106MB   641MB   535MB   linux-swap   swap      swap
>  5      641MB   82.0GB  81.3GB  ext3         untitled
>
> obviously the yaboot partition is #2

That's a 100G drive?

> ----
>>> ----
>>> I haven't done multi-boot Mac's but I have done a bunch of
>>> different Mac
>>> setups. I'm not really a fan of multi-boot on any hardware choice.
>>
>> Different requirements. I need to take time out to learn how to
>> program for ODF and PDF, so I can build programs that will do some
>> things I presently use AppleWorks documents to accomplish. Until
>> then, I need to be able to do a lot of work in the Mac OS.
> ----
> Appleworks is a black hole...it's virtually impossible to get  
> documents
> out of Appleworks unless you are willing to open each one  
> individually,
> save it as the Microsoft equivalent which is a time hog.

Well, actually, Apple's iWok^Hrk suite, now that I look things up, is  
supposed to import a lot of the old AppleWorks stuff okay now. Just  
not the vector stuff.

As for being a black hole, yeah, the data format is archaic.

> OOo has a terrific set of tools for document creation...I think it  
> puts
> Appleworks to shame.

Different strokes for different folks. OOo feels clumsy to me. Feels  
too much like MSOffice.

That may be in part because I've been burned by MSOffice so many  
times that even the slightest whiff of MS turns my stomach.

But what I'm using that is indispensable to me right now is a little  
feature where you can bury a spreadsheet in a "draw" document, show  
small windows on the printable page, and use the sort function with  
random keys to randomize the words in the printed list. Kind of a  
slick way to make word bingo cards, among other things. And I'm doing  
a lot of less program-like stuff with the drawing software, too.

That SVG editor (inkscape?) that was in the news recently may help a  
lot for when I need to do drawings.

Thinking about this, I suppose I should be able to build something  
similar with hidden worksheets in the MSOffice-centric way of  
thinking. Maybe I'll try that with OOo sometime. (I do use it on  
other, more powerful hardware. And I have to admit, I should not be  
surprised if the AppleWorks version might turn out to be less  
intuitive to my fellow teachers who might want to use the teaching  
materials I'm creating than an MSExcel "workbook" or whatever that  
would be called. Also, I've thought, several times, that I might be  
able to get even better effects by programing a plugin for OOo, just  
haven't had the time and luck to figure out how to get a handle on  
that yet.)

> ----
>> Anyway, if there is an openfirmware incantation that I can use
>> instead of installing yaboot, I could try that the next time I have
>> time to work on this.
> ----
> I don't think so (on ppc...this is all you get) - OFI is for the Intel
> based Macs

I think you mean EFI, which is iNTEL's take on openfirmware?

> ----
>> Hate to be noisy, but I sure appreciate any pointers I can get.
> ----
> you probably got the best I had to offer - I actually made a clean
> install of OS 9.1 that I then made into a dmg file with 'Disk Utility'
> so I could just dump a full OS 9 setup onto any computer running  
> OSX so
> it would work in Classic Mode or reboot to OS 9 if I chose it in
> 'Startup Disk' (it's just under 300 mb).

That might also work, but the games aren't the only things. An old  
Metrowerks compiler/IDE, for example, easily consumes 1G, and I'm not  
anxious to put that on an image file on this 300MHz iBook. Don't know  
how much longer I'll need it, but I still need it for a little while.

Actually, there are a number of ways I can free up partitions, once I  
get some old cruft cleared away in the dd-ed copy of the previous  
boot partition, but that's really not on-topic here.

I filed a bug report on the part of this where gparted won't make a  
small enough partition on my disk and anaconda won't use the  
partitions I can make -- bugzilla #460390

Thanks for trading ideas.

Hopefully, I can either get the time to get openBSD set up with X11  
and the Gimp and OOo or I can find out enough to get it to boot  
ofboot and yaboot from my Mac OS 9 partition in the next few months.

Really want to see how heavy OOo is in Linux on this box. The  
NeoOffice fork of OOo was too heavy on Mac OS X 10.2 with 192M of  
RAM. If I want to try that again, or if I want to try the new OOo for  
X11 on the Mac, I'll have to upgrade the iBook to 10.3, and I'm not  
anxious to spend the money and time on that. I'd rather just get a  
new notebook that can handle it OOo better under Linux. Some of these  
webbooks look really nice, and especially handy for when I want to do  
some work on the train.

More rambling than useful information here, hopefully not too much  
noise.

Joel Rees