on 3/28/00 3:50 PM, Frederick Bruckman at fb@enteract.com wrote something
like:

> Marko is asking about how well supported is the DV iMac. Does anyone on this
> list have an answer for him?

    I have no official answers, but I'll give my best gueses.

>> Thanks,
>> 
>> I had already seen this, but I didn't find the answer to my question
>> there.
>> 
>> The model support page only states for iMac that it's supported and
>> remarks 'netboot or kernel on HFS' for iMac DV it states that it's
>> unknown. 

    This is likely due to Apple removing support for booting off of non-HFS
partitions. A few knowledgeable people have hacked NetBSD partition editing
utilities to allow their Mac's (not iMac though I believe) to boot from
NetBSD/HFS partitioned drives. These utilities are not publicly available,
nor will they likely be in the future AFAIK. Provided you know your way
around HD's and partitioning you should be able to do this by partitioning
the drive correctly with MacOS utilities and a custom NetBSD disklabel. I
think the current problem is that the NetBSD disklabel tromps the Apple HD
drivers. You *MIGHT* be able to work around this with the full version of
Hard Disk Toolkit, but I doubt it. That said, I don't think dual boot on a
single spindle is available presently. Presumably people are working on it.

>> I did find some mention of macppc in
>> 
>> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4.2/CHANGES-1.4.2
>> 
>> even wrt. disks, but still don't know whether these changes will allow
>> booting off a NetBSD disklabeled partition. I didn't find anything on
>> the iMacs DV hardware.

    Even if Firewire was supported (again I'm doubtful that it is), there
are not any utilities / programs that could do anything with it yet.
Provided Uni-N and the pci chipsets have been supported, the Rage 128
doesn't get you anything but a dumb frame buffer with no resolution
switching support. No acceleration exists 2D or 3D period. I don't know what
NetBSD will do with the VGA video out port, hopefully it will ignore it if
nothing is connected, hopefully OF will do the same.
     UDF support hasn't even been contemplated, much less started; so
consider your DVD drive a CDROM in NetBSD for all intensive purposes, if it
works at all. If Apple left the iso9660 and/or HFS boot loaders for CD/DVD
in OF, you should be able to boot from a CD if someone could roast you one.
The SCSI mesh driver appears to be broken/buggy since 1.4.1 to present, so
that isn't likely possible from most NetBSD folk. My JVC burner takes 13
seconds after a SCSI reset, the mesh driver in 1.4.1 won't wait longer than
2. I still can't boot with any SCSI CD's/CDR devices connected.
    Sidethought: Toast supports direct SCSI copies, could someone burn a
boot CD from an existing installed version of NetBSD on a SCSI HD?


    Most of the above info is not specific to iMac, it's pretty much the
general state of affairs for MacPPC to my humble knowledge. I'm sure someone
will correct me on all my mistakes.


    Chris

-- 

Murphy was an optimist.