Thanks very much!  There were two or three problems.

- Duh.  I tyed in idel not ide1.  Oddly enough, ideL doesn't exist.

- The PRAM battery is dead and this seems to be causing oddities.  In
particular a

setenv real-base f00000

at times returns 

invalid number

or so.  

- os/x is installed (and in German, a language I don't read well) but 
the nvram command, odddly, doesn't seem to work.

Still, after playing around a bit this morning I was able to 
boot the ISO from below and install started.

Thanks very much!

cheers

bruce

On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 08:40:03AM -0500, Chris Tribo wrote:
> The gray screen with the circle is the MacOS 9 driver boot loader for OS 
> X which means you dropped out of OpenFirmware, or you are really trying 
> to boot an OS X CDROM but specifying the wrong partition number. 
> Typically this happens if you really mess up the boot command, or you 
> are trying to boot a non-existent devalias. In this case it probably 
> means that the systemdisk/startup disk nvram patches that create ide0 
> and ide1 are not loaded. All I had to do was
> 
> setenv boot-device ide1/@0:0
> setenv auto-boot? false
> reset-all
> boot ide1/@0:0,OFWBOOT.XCF;1
> 
> If you can't dir ide1/@0:0,\ then you're trying to boot a hybrid 
> HFS/ISO9660 CD that the oldworld open firmware won't understand. You can 
> grab my unofficial 2.1 ISO that does work here:
> 
> http://user.dtcc.edu/~ctribo/macppc_unofficial.iso
> 
> 
> 
> edoneel@sdf.lonestar.org wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >As of yesterday I was the proud owner of an old Powerbook G3 PDQ.  
> >This means that as of last night I was trying to install NetBSD
> >on said machine.
> >
> >The boot command on the model support page,  boot ide1/@0:0,\OFWBOOT.XCF,
> >seems not to boot from the NetBSD 2.0 CD-Rom that I had sitting around.  
> >It did switch to a solid gray screen with a circle with a cross line
> >on it (think European no parking sign in gray), but that was it.
> >
> >I tired a few other choices both from google searches and from
> >devalias open firmware commands, but, no luck.
> >
> >Is there something special to boot this or should I just netboot
> >and install that way.
> >
> >Thanks in advance!
> >
> >cheers
> >
> >bruce
> >
> 

-- 
edoneel@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org