Debian 12 PPC64 - Replace the Yak?

[mac57mac57]

OK, here is an oddball question.

I have Mac OS X Sorbet Leopard, Mac OS X Tiger and [Debian 12 PPC64 / MintPPC64] all loaded and bootable on my Power Mac G5 Quad. When I hold down the Option key on reboot to get the Boot Picker screen, I get the expected three logos as choices: two typical Mac OS X icons and Debian's infamous Yak.

The thing is, that Yak is not particularly attractive AND is Black and White, while the other two have at least some color. To add to that, both the Debian PPC64 icon and the MintPPC64 icon are both really colorful - Debian's red swirl and MintPPC's green and white logo.

So... I would like to replace the Yak on the boot picker screen with either Debian's red swirl or MintPPC64's logo.

Does anyone know where that Yak "lives" and whether it can be swapped out for something else without rebuilding kernels or re-installing?

As always, any and all insights most appreciated.

 

[Doq]

So, this is probably a misstep, but based on analysis of the OF script generated by ofchooser in that thread, which itself is designed from yaboot:

From my understanding, if the blessed boot file is not a straight binary, there will be a section in the OF script called <OS-BADGE-ICONS>, which is in some sort of format which I believe (unconfirmed) is a 16-bit icon with alpha in three byteplanes.

This blessed boot file will be on the bootstrap volume (since a blessed file necessarily has to be on an HFS volume); you should be able to pull this out with a command in hfs-utils, though after modifying the file you might have to re-bless it.

I'm guessing you're using GRUB since you've mentioned the GNU Yak, and also because yaboot has a Tux icon instead. Your mileage may vary. Good luck.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @Doq, I was not aware that the concept of "blessing" files had survived the legacy Mac OS. Wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

I will have a look at the files in the boot volume (mounted as /boot/grub, correct?) and see if I can find the <OS-BADGE-ICONS> section.

Would you happen to know the hfs-utils command you refer to? I can hunt though the package contents if there is no other way, but then the result may be "hit and miss". Thanks!

BTW, a "tux" icon would be perfect; that Yak just looks so out of place in a modern distro... It reminds me of the sort of graphics that existed in the very early Macintosh era, before "modern" formats like GIF and JPG came along.

I understand the call of tradition, but Debian might want to consider modernizing the Yak to something a bit more ... modern!

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

Did you find a solution for this ?

 

[mac57mac57]

Regrettably, no. I have not had a lot of free time of late to pursue such things; I have barely had time to even boot my MINTPPC64, much less enhance it. Things are starting to slow down now; I will get back to this search in the next little while.

Since you are asking, I am going to guess you haven't cracked this one either?

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

Regrettably, no. I have not had a lot of free time of late to pursue such things; I have barely had time to even boot my MINTPPC64, much less enhance it. Things are starting to slow down now; I will get back to this search in the next little while.

Since you are asking, I am going to guess you haven't cracked this one either?

I haven’t done research on it as I don’t boot MintPPC on real hardware now. Those machines are boxed. Next year I will move with my family to our to be built house. It will be done end of this year. I will then unbox my PowerPC based Macs. I maintain MintPPC on an Intel based laptop. I can cross compile everything and run MintPPC in QEMU (emulated).