[bluedog]

I've been thinking about the methods of booting OSX and OS9.1 and Linux. With the NewWorld ROMs, you have the option to boot with the OPTION key held down and select a bootable partition.

With Linux, you can use yaboot or miboot (I don't recall which work on the NewWorld machines) and you basically have a spoofed system file on a partition and force it to start Linux.

If this is possible, will the OPTION boot process recognize and allow selection of the OS? And if that's true, can you also use the Startup Disk Control Panel?

This would be awesome! You could boot OSX, have OS9 in compatibility mode, or boot Linux and have the MacOS running in its virtual environment (MOL - Mac On Linux)!

This would be SOOO cool! I'm gonna repartition a second hard drive to try this out. My only question is, should OSX go on the first partition, and the other partitions for Linux after? Or can OSX go on the last partition of the drive?

[ 07-18-2001: Message edited by: bluedog ]

[macvillage.net]

I think Apple should provide an option in the firmware that would allow for this. I don't think you can do all 3 though, but you should.

[theolein]

Welcome to the wierdness of openfirmware. I had YDLinux on my mac(which I miss sorely) until X came out. Yaboot never worked properly so I had to boot by hand, which was a pain, but booting into X also doesn't work properly, so I always have to do the four fingered salute (cmd-option-shift-backspace) to switch into X from 9.1(could be a problem with the killed boot partition that I had for Linux).
So as you probably know, you need:
OSX as the first partition and OS9 as the second. For linux you will also need the 32mb hfs boot partition and a swap partition apart from the Linux partition itself.
To boot I think you wil probably have to select the partition manually from openfirmware (cmd-option-o-f) after startup.
I don�t know is this will work properly but the basic syntax in of is:
boot, hdxx, yaboot (xx is yaboot 32mb partition) for linux and for OSX it would be the same thing except bootx.. If you're going to try this I would strongly recomend backing up allyour 9.1 and OSX software and reading up a bit on openfirmware.
Good luck

[CDM]

Yes you can triple boot the new world machines, I have it set up this way as I type this. I used ybin/yaboot to do it. Now every time I want to switch os's I just restart and I select witch one (linux,9.1,X) at a black screen that pops up, and boom the os loads, it's really great, although a little work to set up. www.linuxppc.org had some info under the documentation link.

[vsurfer]

yes,

In open firmware (or startup disk! control panel -OS9- or system prefs OS X) I quadruple boot an iMac G3 400 DV.

SuSE Linux 7.1
OS 10.1.4
OS 9.2.1
OS 9.1

I didn't quite get some of the more elegant methods figured out, so I generally use open firmware, which seems to recognize all those system folders.

Now here's one that I didn't know worked until I tried it -- I set my startup disk in system preferences to the Linux boot/system folder folder -- and it booted Linux. Now if I could find and equally simple way to ask Linux to boot Mac OSX I'd be made in the shade and I wouldn't even need to use open firmware which is a trifle slooow!

Anyone got any ideas -- I'm no Linux guru so I'm not sure how I'd set it ro re-startup from a different /hda partition.
---
PS I have OSX (10GB) as the first partition as it's my main OS, Linux /boot /root and /swap are on later partitions.
Since I installed the entire SuSE linux s/w packages - I already filled my 5GB linux root-- so I'll needto go back and get rid of some of that stuff that i'll never use.

[ 04-25-2002: Message edited by: vsurfer ]

[darkcore]

Michael Coyle posted some info on Resexcellence not too long ago about allowing you to choose what OS boots up on startup by assigning specific keys for each OS. This requires a bootscript and for a few commands to be typed at the openfirmware prompt. Enjoy, http://www.resexcellence.com/hack_ht...04-16-02.shtml

[lgerbarg]

Originally posted by macvillage.net:
<STRONG>I think Apple should provide an option in the firmware that would allow for this. I don't think you can do all 3 though, but you should.</STRONG>

There is no such need for such an option, this is what the firmware is designed to do. The reason is does not work is that many Linux installations do not set up a bootloader that is properly configured to be found by the bootrom, but rather depend on a hardcoded path that has been set in the boot-device field. Thus the boot chooser can't find it when it scans drives, though directly booting the the path works.

All of the boot selection mechanisms work by searching for HFS+ blessed folders that contain files of type "tbxi" that are properly prepared bootinfo files (xcoff or elf with a small xml header). All you need to do is do something like this:

Partition
1 Partition table
2-8 Random OS 9 driver partitions
9 Mac OS 9
10 Mac OS X
11 HFS+ Linux booter partition (yaboot should be set to type tbxi and be in a properly blessed system folder)
12+ Various Linux partitions.

The basic issue is that laying down bootable systems is difficult, laying down multiple bootable systems on the same partition is much more difficult, and most people try to avoid OF boot time issues as much as they can. Better yet, if I recall correctly yaboot has a properly filled out bootinfo record so you even get a little Penguin badge on the partition ;-)

Louis