On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 22:49 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I have a late 2003 iBook G4. It's one of the ones that had the
display fault which Apple wouldn't admit to[1].
The upshot of this is: the internal LCD does not work. Being an
iBook, it also doesn't have a serial port. However it does have wired
network, an external display and several USB ports.
Currently it is running Mac OS X, using the external display.
Here's a puzzle for you: how do I get Fedora PPC on this machine?
There is no visible way to get to the OpenFirmware boot prompt. (I
mean, I can get to it, but I have to type blind, and I don't see any
messages).
It does seem to boot into the Fedora PPC CD disk 1, judging by the
noises it makes. Of course it's not very much use because it won't
use the external display, so I can't see anything.
So use VNC.
If you give the installer enough information on the kernel command line,
you don't need to interact with it at all -- it'll go straight into a
VNC install and the first thing you have to do is connect to its VNC
server. It's been a while since I've done a totally headless install,
but ISTR the things you need to provide are:
- Language
- Keyboard
- Repository URL
- IP information
It may be that switching to NetworkManager in the installer has broken
this capability. Try it on a machine that _isn't_ headless until you can
get from the bootloader prompt into VNC without having to touch it. It
doesn't have to be a PPC machine.
Kickstart is another alternative, perhaps.
I have not been able to get it to netboot. It sends packets to my
dnsmasq-based PXE server, and dnsmasq sends packets back, but nothing
further happens. (This dnsmasq configuration can boot PC guests
fine).
Is there something I can type blind at the CD prompt? (And what?)
Is there another boot method?
Serial-over-ethernet?
USB serial ports? (I don't have one, but I could get one if you think
they would work).
You can telnet into OpenFirmware -- some versions of it, at least. Try
something like:
" enet:telnet,10.0.0.1" io
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_boot.html
If you can't telnet into OF, you could still make an installer boot.iso
with the appropriate kernel command line (to get it straight to VNC)
hardcoded into its yaboot.conf.
--
David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse(a)intel.com Intel Corporation