Note that multiple operating systems booting on a single machine is still something of a black art. This document does not even attempt to document the various boot managers, which vary by architecture and even by subarchitecture. You should see your boot manager's documentation for more information.
The boot loader for OldWorld Power Macintosh machines is quik. You can also use it on CHRP. The installer will attempt to set up quik automatically at the Make Hard Disk Bootable step. The setup has been known to work on 7200, 7300, and 7600 Powermacs, and on some Power Computing clones.
For beige G3s, a patched quik first.b module is available at http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan/ftp/quik-first.b-g3. To apply the patched module, follow these steps. After booting back into the installer, switch to console 2. Copy that file to your /target/boot folder, and rename it first.b to supercede the first.b that's there. Then run:
chroot /target /bin/bash mount -t proc proc /proc quik -v exit |
If you want to use BootX to boot into the installed system, just select your desired kernel in the Linux Kernels folder, un-choose the ramdisk option, and add a root device corresponding to your installation; e.g. /dev/hda8.
A final option for machines where MacOS/BootX is not desired and quik is not functional, is to patch the floppy disk image in order to make it into a boot disk. Use ResEdit in MacOS to edit the System's cmdl resource, or use a binary editor such as beav to edit the image directly, to remove the ramdisk arguments and substitute an appropriate root=/dev/xxx argument. A perl script is also available for this purpose.
If the machine fails to boot after completing the installation, and stops with a boot: prompt, try typing Linux followed by Enter. (The default boot configuration in quik.conf is labeled Linux). The labels defined in quik.conf will be displayed if you press the Tab key at the boot: prompt. You can also try booting back into the installer, and editing the /target/etc/quik.conf placed there by the Make Hard Disk Bootable step. Clues for dealing with quik are available at http://penguinppc.org/projects/quik/.
To boot back into MacOS without resetting the nvram, type bye at the Open Firmware prompt (assuming MacOS has not been removed from the machine). To obtain an OpenFirmware prompt, hold down the command-option-o-f keys while cold booting the machine. If you need to reset the OpenFirmware nvram changes to the MacOS default in order to boot back to MacOS, hold down the command-option-p-r keys while cold booting the machine.
Newer (mid 1998 and on) PowerMacs use yaboot as their boot loader. The installer will set up yaboot automatically, so all you should need to do is run the Make Hard Disk Bootable step, if that completes successfully then your disk should now be bootable and OpenFirmware will be set to boot Debian GNU/Linux.
On G4 machines and iBooks, you can hold down the option key and get a graphical screen with a button for each bootable OS, Debian GNU/Linux will be a button with a small penguin icon.
If you kept MacOS and at some point it changes the OpenFirmware boot-device variable you should reset OpenFirmware to its default configuration. To do this hold down the command-option-p-r keys while cold booting the machine.
The labels defined in yaboot.conf will be displayed if you press the Tab key at the boot: prompt.
Resetting OpenFirmware on G3 or G4 hardware will cause it to boot Debian GNU/Linux by default (if you correctly partitioned and placed the Apple_Bootstrap partition first). If you have Debian GNU/Linux on a SCSI disk and MacOS on an IDE disk this may not work and you will have to enter OpenFirmware and set the boot-device variable, ybin normally does this automatically.
After you boot Debian GNU/Linux for the first time you can add any additional options you desire (such as dual boot options) to /etc/yaboot.conf and run ybin to update your boot partition with the changed configuration. Please read the yaboot HOWTO for more information.