First Install on a G5, yaboot problems

CaptainRabies · n00b Joined: 13 Sep 2012 Posts: 13

I've been attempting to get Gentoo up and running on my old dual 2.3 G5, and am very close. I have gotten yaboot to run on startup, but it cannot find the kernel I compiled.
I need a second pair of eyes (and likely the wisdom of experience) to make it all happen. Here goes:

My kernel is located on an ext4 filesystem in partition 4 of my hard disk. I am under the impression yaboot can use such a system, but I am aware that in the past it could not. This may be my first issue.
The second issue I'm having is that yabootconfig will not run, so I've been forced to write my own file. Please take a look at it:

fr3eatlast · n00b Joined: 21 Jul 2012 Posts: 41 Location: Marquette, MI

I just install Gentoo on my son's G4 and I had to change the root line in the yaboot config file to

CaptainRabies · n00b Joined: 13 Sep 2012 Posts: 13

Thankyou for your response fr3eatlast. Unfortunately I've tried every iteration I can think of to make your solution work, but that just doesn't seem to be the problem. Found this out the hard way.

Update: After much head scratching, I believe the real problem is that my kernel is hosted on an ext4 filesystem. Yaboot supports booting from an HFS+ (apple's filesystem) and ext2 (the baseline linux system), but essentially nothing else (please correct me if I'm wrong). I believe I have three options here:
A) Start over from scratch, making at least the partition which contains the kernel an ext2 filesystem. Not desired.
B) Download a liveCD of UbuntuPPC, and use Gparted to resize my main partition, carve out an ext2 (or HFS+) partition, and copy a kernel over to it. Point yaboot at it, tell the kernel where to look for the root filesystem, voila. Although likely to work, this feels somewhat like cheating to me.
C) Grub2. I hear it supports PPC now, and I've heard some success stories, notably this guy: http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog/posts/running_grub2_on_powerpc_macs/
Does anyone out there, besides him, have experience with compiling a smallish Grub2? Can it be done from the minimal CD's environment?

fr3eatlast · n00b Joined: 21 Jul 2012 Posts: 41 Location: Marquette, MI

I didn't even think of the fact that your root file system is on an ext4 partition. If I remember correctly you are right and yaboot can only boot from ext2, ext3 and hfs. I don't have any experience with grub2 on ppc, so I'm sorry I can't help you with that. I'm still learning about gentoo on ppc.

Imho, your best bet would be to carve out a small partition with a live cd of your choice and point yaboot towards it, even if it does feel like cheating :wink:

CaptainRabies · n00b Joined: 13 Sep 2012 Posts: 13

Addendum to Murphy's law: Everything has already gone wrong, you just don't know about it yet.

The filesystem malarkey was in fact the problem. I have my kernels on an ext2 partition, and I've managed to successfully point yaboot at them, and they assume control. This problem is officially fixed. I'll post a new topic elsewhere for the next one. Thanks for the ideas!