sidestory (how i got my laptop)

I recently had the joy of acquiring an Apple Titanium G4 Laptop. This is kind of interesting in and of itself, because I'm a Linux junkie who reluctantly uses Windows desktops for client work; a year ago I would have laughed at you if you had told me I'd be craving an Apple machine. But the one-two of Apple's gorgeous notebook design and its release of OS/X, a consumer-deployed Unix with a gorgeous front end, I was hooked. I talked my boss into the necessity of porting our company's software to OS/X and expensed the purchase. (Hey, I did do the port a week after I got the box. =) )

I waited on edge for weeks for the laptop to arrive; I had bought it through the Apple Developer Discount program, so it didn't really cost my company very much at all. Unfortunately, that meant that shipping dates could range up to two months after the order was put in. Finally, the box came. Having no interest in OS/9, I immediately plopped in the OS/X CD to install a real operating system. Hurrah! A real laptop!

Urg, sort of.

The first generation DVD drives that Apple decided to slam into these thin laptops were too thin. So thin that the CDs would grind up against the roof of the drive and be unable to spin, making a horrendous WHIZZAWHIZZAWHIZZAWHIZZA at around 100dB. A few coworkers from surrounding cubes ducked their heads in: "Hey, what's that sound?"

I had to very sheepishly explain to them that my brand new shiny toy had shipped broken. Doh! I sent it back the very next day for repair. I didn't see it again for a month. So you can imagine how happy I was to finally get it back: after three months of waiting, I had a functional laptop. =)

installing linux

Last weekend, I went to DEFCON, a computer security convention. A really surprising number of people there had Apple laptops, and a large portion of them were running Linux or OpenBSD on them! I thought "hey, I could do that, too!"...as soon as I got back home, I set off to triboot my computer between OS/X, Linux, and OS/9. (Even though I don't care for OS/9 much, OS/X can't play DVDs yet, and a lot of system updates (for the firmware, etc.) are released under OS/9 only.)

I grabbed the Debian PPC ISOs, but the installer was rather unfriendly and kept puking on me, even when I put in the special boot-options to tell it to use the OpenFirmware graphics only. Whenever I got to the partition part, it would tell me I had partitions that were hundreds of gigabytes large. If I tried to format any partitions, it would crawl, a sector every other second, through what it claimed to be billions of sectors. I gave up after five hours and decided to do some more research.

I looked a bit at LinuxPPC, but was told that it's pretty wildly unstable and uncomfortable. YellowDog 2.0 had been getting some positive vibes from the people I consulted with, so I downloaded the ISO and burned myself an install CD.

Separately, I had been having issues running "Classic" (OS/9) from within OS/X, and I was told it was a very good idea to have them on separate partitions. I backed up my handful of interesting data on the box, wiped my partition table using the disk utility that came with my Titanium's "Software Restore" CD, and allocated four partitions: 3Gb for OS/9, 11Gb for OS/X, 5.5Gb for Linux, and a 200Mb swap partition for Linux. As it turned out, that was one too few! Yellow Dog Linux wanted an additional 10Mb "boot partition". Apple seems to create a whole bevy of little partitions, so it ended up that my Linux root is on the 11^th partition! Crazy. So you need to allocate five partitions by hand to run the whole setup properly.

I reinstalled OS/9, ran Software Update to update my firmware and the OS, installed OS/X, ran Software Update a few times, installed my OS/X development environment and configured my laptop for NIS, and then proceeded to install Linux. There were some issues with the YDL install, for sure (It died repeatedly with weird errors when I tried to tell it what NIS domain I was in) and only supported a text-mode install, but it seemed to generally go alright.

At the end of the install, I made the mistake of choosing to boot MacOS by default, figuring I'd be presented with a little menu at boot of which partition (OS/9, OS/X, Linux) I wanted to boot to. I reboot into OS/9. Whoops.

juggling multiple OSes

A Incidentally, to get into Open Firmware, reboot, wait for the reboot noise to finish, then quickly press (in order) Apple-Option-O-F. Many guides get this wrong and tell you to hold down all four buttons as you are rebooting. You really have to depress them (in order) right after the reboot to get into Open Firmware. It really weirded me out that Open Firmware is a Forth interpreter. Damn it, you're not supposed to be able to interactively program your computer at the BIOS level! =) Freaky.

It's good to memorize what partitions your OSes are on. For me, it was easy. OS/9 was on partition 9, OS/X on partition 10, and Linux on 11. So in Open Firmware to boot into OS/9 I'd type boot hd:9,\\:tbxi. To boot into OS/X: boot hd:10,\\:tbxi, and to boot into Linux: boot hd:11,\\yaboot. (OS/9 and OS/X use ":tbxi" as their loader, whereas Linux uses "yaboot".) I now could boot into any of three operating systems on my computer! All of them work perfectly! I've even got sound under Linux! (Although sleeping is a little buggy still...)

It gets stranger yet: in OS/X you can run OS/9. It's called "Classic mode". In Linux, you can also run OS/9 - it's called Mac-On-Linux. This will let you run MacOS on PowerPC Linux really fast (it's not having to emulate anything. It just runs the OS directly!) So you can run your different OSes inside each other. =) XDarwin lets your run (and compile) X/Windows programs on OS/X, Bjust to keep things interesting. Oh, and then there's the GNU-Darwin ports collection with several thousand BSD packages for OS/X (and native Darwin). Whee!

Dave's nifty Tip of the Day: in OS/X, type ">console" as your username at login to get a graphic-free login prompt! =)

More info later: the short of it is that tri-boot's quite comfortably possible, and it's fun to run KDE 2.1 on your Titanium laptop! (And boy is it fast!) Oh, and OS/X is cool, 95% POSIX-compliant (eck - almost there, guys!), and has crappy man pages. All hopefully fixed soon, except for the fsck'ing Alt-Tab issue (linear progression instead of recency stack!). Good job overall, though!

Later! =)