Ralf, Are you willing/able to install a small MacOS (8 or 9, not X) partition on these machines? If so, you can use the BootX bootloader. If you don't know about it, it's a MacOS app that loads a Linux kernel and ramdisk, along with a boot-time parameter string. BootX provides essentially all the important functionality of yaboot for NewWorld Macs or grub/lilo for x86s.
There are four different bootloaders for Macs. One is yaboot, which only works on NewWorld machines. The others are miboot, quik, and BootX, which work on OldWorld machines, but not on NewWorld. For technical reasons having to do with the details of how OldWorld Macs get driver software for their boot devices, the miboot bootloader will never be useful for anything but floppy disk booting. Even if the cleanroom re-implementation project gets off the ground and produces a working bootloader, this will not change. Quik gets around this problem by using Open Firmware to access its boot devices. However, until recently, quik did not support initial ramdisks. This makes it useless for booting any of the stock 2.6 based kernels. There is, apparently, in the works an attempt to fix this. But it's not clear that the fix will make it into the distribution before sarge is released. Even if a fixed quik makes it possible to boot 2.6 kernels from a hard disk or over a network, quik's inherent reliance on specialized model-dependent patches to the Open Firmware makes me think that it's not (and never will be) for the faint of heart. In my very humble opinion, that doesn't leave much except BootX for the "general user" with an OldWorld Mac. Fortunately, BootX "just works" on all the models of Oldworld Macs that I've tried it on. I recommend you give it a try. Enjoy! Rick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
