Dual Booting OSX / Linux with Grub

[vddrnnr]

Hi all,

Does anyone have experience on dual booting with grub
instead of yaboot?

Best regards,
voidRunner

 

[vddrnnr]

Hi all,

Can anyone share their experiences dual booting?

Best regards,
voidRunner

 

[millerj123]

For all things UNIXy, why not just run tools from the command line?

I never bothered dual-booting, just ran a windows VM on my Mac. Even that became a bother, so I set up a small windows computer to remote into whenever I need a few windows apps.

 

[AphoticD]

Hi all,

Can anyone share their experiences dual booting?

Best regards,
voidRunner

I have only used yaboot recently on my G4s and G5s. I understand grub2 is PowerPC Mac supported and can support a much wider range of hardware on boot (such as PCIe SSDs possibly?), but for my purposes yaboot works well.

I find it easiest to work directly on the bootstrap HFS partition instead of depending on ybin for minor changes. The small HFS partition can be mounted on OS X and Linux for changes to yaboot.conf. Just “sudo mkdir /mnt/yaboot” then “sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s2 /mnt/yaboot” (replacing the dev path as needed for the OS, such as /dev/sda2)

In order to boot between OSes headlessly on my G5s, I setup a series of nvram scripts, which I named “rebootlinux”, “reboottiger” and “rebootleopard”. I put these three scripts on each OS at /usr/local/bin and can execute from any of the three systems to specifically reboot into an OS without using the yaboot selection screen or system preferences on OS X.

The easiest way to get the fully qualified OF device path for your boot drive is to select an OS X system from Startup Disk System preferences. When you click on a volume, an nvram update is performed. This can be viewed using the command line tool “nvram -p boot-device”. Copy down the current output and then modify the partition number in the path to suit your boot option. I’m typing on my phone right now, but from memory, on my DC G5, I had the Linux bootstrap HFS at partition 2, Leopard at partition 5 and Tiger at 7.

Your rebootlinux script will then be something like;
“nvram boot-device=<open-firmware-volume-path>@0:2,\\yaboot && reboot” (to be executed with sudo)

(nvram command syntax is a little different across systems, but you should be able to easily translate)

Run “diskutil list” to view your partition map for preparing the scripts.

 

[mrkapqa]

no, but i use yaboot,

only if you install newer systems like debian jessie, i had sometimes problems.
(it would not recognize second HDD after installation succeeded and installation became broke)


when i go into open-firmware , from there i type

boot cd:,\install\yaboot


and installation proceeds (with DEBIAN)


but one needs to have a partition ready prior (with UBUNTU it is also possible to resize an existing partition)


After installation you can then choose wether to boot Debian or MacOS .