If you haven't read my other article on customizing yaboot, your best bet is actually to start here: Tweak yaboot so Mac OS X is my default OS, not Ubuntu or Yellow Dog Linux.
Having installed Yellow Dog, I suddenly couldn�t see Ubuntu any more. If I hadn�t previously written down the partition number that I used to install Ubuntu, I would have suspected that it had just vanished.
A quick query to Ethan Benson, developer of yaboot, and I had my answer: I needed to move the individual Linux partition specifier (it says partition=2) into the YDL section and add another section for Ubuntu that specified the partition of the Ubuntu installation (partition=9).
I ended up with two image blocks:
image=/boot/vmlinux-2.6.8-1.ydl.7
partition=2
label=yellowdog
read-only
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.8-1.ydl.7.img
root=/dev/hda2
append=�rhgb quiet�
image=/boot/vmlinux
partition=9
root=/dev/hda9
label=ubuntu
read-only
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
When the Mac boots, I still see the standard yaboot options of linux, macosx or cdrom, but selecting linux now gives me the option of typing in either �yellowdog� or �ubuntu� to specify which I wanted to actually start.
Works like a charm!
Learn more about Ubuntu Linux for Apple Macs, or learn more about Yellow Dog Linux. Both are very cool alternatives...
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Hi Dave,
Thanks for being out there! I have a PowerBook and a G4 tower that I've struggled to configure with a dual boot OS X/Ubuntu and finally got on G4. (I had to get free space designated, installl Kubuntu first, then OS X. It finally worked. Figuring out the partition stuff for someone beginning from square one is a tough go. Anyway, with that drive set up, Kubuntu started by default unless I chose "X" from the options screen right at startup. But when I used the OS X preference menu to select OS X as the startup default, I lost the options screen (Yaboot?) so I can't choose Linux now—and it's not recognized in the OS X Startup menu. So, how can I get the startup choice screen back?
Thanks
Jim