Booting headless PowerMac G5

[Michel Dänzer]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 11:32 +0100, Romain Goyet wrote: 
> 
>   Here's a summary about "how to boot a PowerMac G5 without a screen
> attached". As many people have noticed, default yaboot install won't
> boot unless a screen is attached.
> 
>   Actually, the workaround is really simple. Thing is, that's the
> "ofboot.b" script that messes things up. This script is a "bridge",
> that actually either starts yaboot or let you boot off of a CD. I
> don't know what's the point, since OpenFirmware already lets you boot
> off of the CD by pressing C on boot…
> 
>   So basically, to boot headless, all you have to do is to tell
> OpenFirmware to boot straight off the yaboot binary, and to skip the
> ofboot.b
> Just boot into OpenFirmware (Command-Option-O-F), and type :
> setenv boot-device hd:2,yaboot (where 2 is the number of the partition
> containing yaboot)
> boot
> 
> And here you go, you can unplug that useless monitor :-)
> 
> References :
> http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/archive/2005/02/THE_WINE_OF_BOOT.html
> http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnPowerPC

That's good to know, thanks.


> By the way, as of writing this, grub2 on PPC from debian gives a "out
> of memory" issue. Known bug.

That's on the G5? It's working on my PowerBook, but I haven't updated
the grub2 binaries on the bootstrap partition in a while...


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer