Subject: Re: Help! I just can't figure out how to boot NetBSD on my iMac
To: Makoto Fujiwara <makoto@ki.nu>
From: Lasse =?iso-8859-1?Q?Hiller=F8e?= Petersen <lhp@toft-hp.dk>
List: port-macppc
Date: 02/06/2001 13:18:10
>I had an experience the trying all the numbers from 0 to say 15,
>one of them worked ( Without number also works).
>---
>(Makoto Fujiwara)
Thanks, it seems I now can find the right partition, which is 9 on my disk
(I have repartitioned, so I have an HFS+ at partition 8, a small HFS at 9,
an A/UX root&usr partition at 10, and another (big) HFS+ at 11.)
I was rather confused about the nice things people were saying about your
webpage, however I just had a look at it again from my NetBSD-i386 box
(before that I had only tried Netscape and iCab from Mac OS 9). It seems
that the sidebar menu on the left side does not show up in iCab and
Netscape on Mac OS, so until now, I had only seen the first page. No wonder
I got the impression something important was missing. I don't know whether
it's an extra <HTML> tag that messes things up, you may want to check it.
I have been using the ofwboot.elf and netbsd.ram.gz from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/macppc/installation/
I see now that these are probably too old, and I should be using the ones
referred to from your pages. Finally there seems to be hope!
Yes, I got it to boot, and I even dared newfs the partition rwd0a. Viewing
the partitions with disklabel wd0 had me slightly confused, as the A/UX
root&usr partition showed up first in the list, as partition a, despite
being partition 10; but the sizes matched and the cylinders shown looked
right too, being out of order. And since I'm now typing this in Mac OS, no
harm was done to my other partitions. Right now I'm FTP'ing the snapshot
sets with my i386 machine, as I had a problem with getting the nameserver
working right on the macppc.
I just realized that I haven't set aside a partition for swap; but with 192
MB RAM I suppose I should be able to run OK without swap.
Well, in any case, I have just booted without swap, everything runs fine,
now I just have to figure out how to start X and such. (And buy a
three-button mouse.)
BTW, the boot command I use from OF now is:
boot hd:8,ofwboot.elf hd:10,/netbsd
It works just fine with ofwboot.elf on the HFS+ partition, so I can get rid
of the HFS partition and use it for swap, if I can figure out how.
Thank you all for being such a great and helpful bunch! Now I finally have
a dual-boot iMac, and three architectures running NetBSD!
-Lasse