Booting headless PowerMac G5

[Romain Goyet]

2010/3/25 Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net>:
> 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.
>

You're welcome. Actually I also wrote this as a memo for myself :-)

>
>> 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...
>
>


Yeah, that's on a PowerMac QuadG5.
I think that's a known issue :
http://www.mail-archive.com/grub-devel@gnu.org/msg04455.html
However it might be another one since it's working for you. I'm using
grub2 from Debian stable.


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