f7 yaboot problem on G3

[Mike Hammill]

Well, still no luck from my end.  Does anyone have even the slightest
idea if this works on a G3?  I received no response thus far. I realize
Fedora is moving away from PPC, but I was still hoping for a life-line.
I saw f7 demoed by a friend at work on a x86 machine and it was really
impressive.  

I have never really seen an alternative to yaboot on PPC for newworld
Macs.  Is there some other bootloader I should try?  Is f7 know to work
on any other ppc32-based machines?  I have a G4 I could possibly try.

/Mike

On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 16:30 +0200, Mike Hammill wrote:
> Could someone provide me with a reasonable yaboot.conf file or tell me
> how to make one to get f7 to boot on a G3?
> 
> Background:
> 
> I've been running fc6 on a Mac G3 (blue and white) and earlier version
> of fc before that.  I really like it and decided to upgrade to f7.  I
> used the clean install option (nothing else on the hard drive) from the
> DVD and the installation went fine.  
> 
> Originally, I choose the default layout, which seems to put nearly
> everything under LVM.  I couldn't boot that, and I figured yaboot
> couldn't handle LVM.  So, I started over from scratch and put reasonable
> things on LVM, the rest on their own partitions, namely:
> 
> /dev/sda3 /boot ext2 120M
> /dev/sda4 /var/cache/openafs ext2 2048M
> /dev/sda5 / ext3 2048M
> /dev/sda6 swap 1024M
> /dev/sda7 LVM where
> /dev/vg/home 5120M mounted under /home
> /dev/vg/opt 2048M mounted as expected...
> /dev/vg/tmp 2048M ...
> /dev/vg/usr 10240M ...
> /dev/vg/var 5120M ...
> /dev/vg/userlocal 1024M ...
> 
> This also installed fine, and f7 seemed to create /dev/sda2 as an Apple
> bootstrap partition.  However, when rebooting, I got the broken folder
> icon and the best I can do was reboot to the rescue disk.  Rescue did a
> great job, found my f7 installation, mounted all the above (except
> openafs partition) and I then chrooted to /mnt/sysimage.  There, I have
> tried various incantations to install the boot image to the bootstrap
> partition, but nothing works.
> 
> Is one to do it from outside chroot, e.g., 
> 
> yabootconfig -t /mnt/sysimage -b /dev/sda2
> 
> or inside using ybin -v or only use mkofboot?
> 
> I hate to say it, but the closest success I got was booting with
> Gentoo's CD, mounting everything, running yabootconfig and then on
> reboot it at least boots f7's initrd and vmlinuz (however it kernel
> panics).  Using only f7's rescue disk, I tried, after letting rescue
> find the installation, the following.  Note here I did NOT chroot first:
> 
> Try 1:
> yabootconfig --chroot /mnt/sysimage
> Got:
> Unable to locate bootstrap parition on /dev/sda...
> 
> Try 2:
> yabootconfig --chroot /mnt/sysimage -b /dev/sda2
> Got:
> Install yaboot bootstrap on /dev/sda2 to boot Linux from /dev/sda5?
> [Yes]
> Creating a simple /mnt/sysimage/etc/yaboot.config...
> Enter kernel image: /mnt/sysimage/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7
> Enter an initrd image: /mnt/sysimage/boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img
> /mnt/sysimage/sbin/yabootconf: line 733: ofpath: command not found
> yabootconfig: unable to determine OpenFirmware device name to /dev/sda
> aborting.
> 
> Try 3:
> PATH_PREFIX=/mnt/sysimage yabootconfig --chroot /mnt/sysimage
> -b /dev/sda2
> Got: same as above except it got a little further.  After entering the
> initrd, it gave:
> Running mkofboot to make the disk bootable...
> Failed to initialize HFS working directories: No such file or directory
> mkofboot: /dev/sda2 appears to have never had a bootstrap installed,
> please run mkofboot.
> 
> I'd like to not give up on f7, but the above is pretty frustrating.
> 
> Best regards,
> /Mike
> 
>