So here I am with that G4 on my desk, trying to put NetBSD on
it. I finally succeeded, but it was a very painful and frustrating
experience.

  Try #1: Put an uncompressed kernel on the mac partition, then
use OF to boot it. No go, since it fails immediately with "CLAIM
FAILED". I would have tried the method to work around that problem
as described in the FAQ (setting the console to serial) except for
the small annoyance that this machine does not have any serial port.

  Try #2: Boot ofwboot.xcf and use that for booting the kernel on
the same (mac HFS+) partition. This doesn't work either, since
ofwboot doesn't seem to be able to load stuff off an HFS+ partition.
This is not really made clear in the install notes.

  Try #3: Download the macppc.iso and boot that. Still no luck,
since the kernel image is buried deep in directories that will
be mangled (long names). I tried a couple of variations and gave
up.

  Try #4: Boot over the network. Didn't work either, loading and
running ofwboot via net works all right, but then fetching the
kernel does not. I then resorted to snooping the ethernet traffic
to find out what goes wrong.

  Typing another file name at the ofwboot "Boot:" prompt throws
ofwboot in confusion and it tries to fetch the new file from some
strange ip address (0.96.223.80). 

  Specifying "boot ofwboot.xcf netbsd.ram" does not work either,
ofwboot seems to _always_ fetch a file named netbsd -- renaming
netbsd.ram to netbsd got me finally going.

  Then the installation went rather smoothly, except for sysinst
almost making me overwrite the mac partition, had I not double
checked the values it gave me. I then manually installed and
all is well. (Almost, but I'll put that in a new post)

	mjl