Apple PowerMac G4 SuSE 7.1 Installation

Background

Linux support for Apple PowerMac G4 is very good. There are mainly two problematic areas: booting and X. Booting can be easily solved by installing the lastest yaboot package while X depends on the availablity of drivers. Another problem is dealing with the OpenFirmware BIOS to boot from a CD or the HD.

OpenFirmware

To enter the OF prompt press and hold ALT-APPLE-O-F after switching on the computer (when you hear the gong). Some useful commands:

eject cd:	Ejects or inserts the CDROM drive (remember, it lacks the button)
devalias	Prints a list of device aliases and where they point to
print-env [name]	Prints the value of a variable (or all variables). The most relevant variable is `boot-device`
set-env <variable> <value>	Sets a variable to a value
boot [device/file path]	Boots from the specified device/file path or from what is set in `boot-device`

Some command values for the boot-device variable or as parameter to the boot command:

hd:,\\:tbxi	Boot from the first partition on the hard disk that contains a blessed folder and run the file with the tbxi type. MacOS's System Folder is such a folder and also yaboot is set to the tbxi type (the ybin programm does all the setup work in a comfortable way).
cd:\\yaboot	Load yaboot from the CDROM (use this to start the SuSE Installation CD. The CD will not start without this because it contains a tweaked MacOS system that does not work on new G4 computers.

Installation

Don't use the normal fdisk utility to setup the partitions. Either use MacOS's Disk Setup utility or use pdisk on Linux. Using the fdisk utility will create a DOS partition table on the harddisk (which won't interfere with the MacOS table) but if a disk contains both DOS and MacOS tables then the kernel will look only at the DOS table. Create a small (800K) HFS (NOT HFS+) partition for the boot files.
Start the installation from the SuSE CD (boot cd:\\yaboot at the OF prompt) and choose YaST 1 (YaST 2 needs X which works not at all/badly)
Choose expert installation mode. Switch to console 2 (IIRC) which contains a prompt.
Use pdisk to organize/setup the partitions, Do not use the YaST 1 menu to set up partitions, it will create a DOS partition table which rill not be bootble by OF
Select the root partition (and others you setup, like swap) in the menu "Set target partitions/filesystems"
Continue with the installation as usual, select the packages you want to install etc.
DO NOT RESTART THE SYSTEM ! Download and install yaboot
Read the yaboot and yaboot.conf manual pages and edit /etc/yaboot.conf to reflect the system (the kernel is /boot/vmlinux-2.4, the bootstrap partition is the HFS partition we created previously).
Run ybin -v to install the boot manager.

Written by Schlomo Schapiro, MobilEye Vision Technologies, Ltd.