Good morning all--

I've been struggling (a few days of time and lotsa
INSTALL.txt scouring combined with googling) with an
installation on a G4 (450mhz).  Open Firmware
trivially boots my cd (boot cd:\ofwboot.xcf
netbsd.macppc) and runs the installer (mostly; I get
complaints about missing MBR magic) fine.  Oddly
enough, even though I'm at OFv3, using the install
sets actually works though the instructions say I
should use the re-install sets which just error out on
me.

At this point, I'm stuck trying to get my
freshly-installed system to boot.  Remarkably, things
look mostly okay when I boot again and go to the shell
I can mount /dev/wd0a to /mnt just fine and
everything's there.

Bottom line:  I think I'm a little screwed because the
Mac OS X installation is wrecked (I used an installer
cd to run the disk utility so I should have an
available partition) so there's no reasonable way to
copy ofwboot.xcf (as an aside: is the hfsutils package
too large to include with the installer?; putting the
executables themselves on an appropriate ftp site
somewhere would even be okay) to the partition.

Anyone have any thoughts?  Would an Open Firmware
upgrade make my life better?  Likewise, would running
diskless be a better option?

Looking at the OpenBSD instructions, it looks like
they allow you to do a dedicated machine installation
that doesn't require mucking with partitioning and
Open Firmware.  Since I won't use Mac OS X on this
machine (this isn't ideological -- I either need linux
or linux-compat), would going the OpenBSD route be a
more straight-forwarding path to get this machine up
and running?  For that matter, debian or Yellow Dog
Linux would (I guess) be okay as well.

Thanks!

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