Linux on an iBook- successful

[Krishnan Venkatachalam <vk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We (Rahul Handa and I) managed to get Linux working on an iBook
yesterday. I thought I would share some of the experience with the list.

1)	GT Enterprises managed to ship a Linuxcentral "single CD" version of
Yellowdoglinux 1.2 to me.

2)	The worst part is getting to boot into linux after the install. The
install itself is the standard redhat style text install.

3)	The YDL CD had an error in the "Yaboot.conf". Yaboot is the dual
bootup utility. For older Macs one can also use BootX. The correction
was later found at
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/faq_solutions.shtml#boot

Please do read this else you will NOT be able to boot up into Linux
except from the Primary partition. Once this was done there was no
problem at all.

4)	Even X and the trackpad works straight off the install. Remember you
have to choose the mouse as a "single button apple data bus type".

5)	The one other problem we had was to get to the CMOS equivalent of the
Mac. You have to hold down "command+option+P+R" to clear the NVRAM as
soon as you power up. Then when you hear the boot up sound for three
times and the screen goes white switch to "command +option+O+F" to get
to the Open Firmware (CMOS setup for the Mac). Had a pleasent surprise
when we found out that at the Open Firmware prompt one can use unix
commands !!!. (Yes there is a nice prompt available in Open Firmware.)
This ibook runs MacOS 9.


6)	Partitioning too was a bit tricky. One has to use fdisk which actualy
runs "pdisk". The trick is to delete the partitions and then start with
the first free partition. If your last HFS (Mac type partition was say
09 and your free partition is say 10 then in pdisk type "10p" fir the
"First Block" and for the length of the partition you can give the
blocksize. For the next partition type "11p" and so on.

Havent done much else at present. Takes a bit of reading to get to know
the Mac internals but, loading YDL on an iBook has been great fun.
Learnt a bit about mac internals too...thanks to Linux!

So this is the second Mac that Ive installed Linux. The first was on an
iMac during the "Linux Demo Day". But that was "LinuxPPC 1999 Q3".

Plan to show this to all during the next LUG meet at Delhi. Raju please
slot us in.

---VK