HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC

Abstract

This document contains installation and usage instructions for yaboot, the GNU/Linux PowerPC bootloader.

Copyright Notice

This document may be distributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License. © 1998–2001 Chris Tillman

This document is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This document is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at the GNU website. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Contents

• 1 Yaboot's Purpose
• 2 System Requirements
• 3 Obtaining Yaboot
• 4 Creating the Bootstrap Partition
• 5 Yabootconfig: Make It Easy
• 6 Customizing Your Boot Configuration
  • 6.1 Linux Style Device Paths
  • 6.2 OpenFirmware Device Paths
  • 6.3 Required Settings
  • 6.4 Boot Menu Options
  • 6.5 Kernel Image Settings
  • 6.6 Optional and Cool Settings
• 7 Saving Boot Configuration Changes
• 8 Common Mistakes
• 9 Recovering From Misconfiguration
  • 9.1 Resetting the NVRAM
  • 9.2 Loading Yaboot
  • 9.3 Manually Loading a Kernel Image
• 10 Yaboot as a Temporary Bootloader
• 11 For More Information