Dual Boot NetBSD And MacOS On An iMac

camateg writes: "I've yet to find news of someone who has done this with a single hard disk, but I'm sure someone has. However, I seem to be the first to make a web page about it having done it, correct me if I'm wrong. This page is just a small tuturial I came up with to describe how I *finally* got things working. No netboot, no ofwboot.xcf on CD, etc. Yeah, I should probably include yaboot to make it complete..."

Comments

What right does he have!!!

[acidmaple]

...oh yeah

Having stopped short of the summit, I salute you.

[toddpw]

"leia" (the iMac that built NetBSD/macppc 1.4.2) has had its HD divided into MacOS and NetBSD areas for quite some time, but I never did figure out how to run ofwboot from HFS. I just kept netbooting ofwboot and entering the local path to the kernel.

My hat is off to you, sir.

Re:*BSD is dying

[toddpw]

Can I moderate this down on the grounds that it's posted by a cron job?

Dual boot OSX / NetBSD iMacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!

iMac and BSD.

[saintlupus]

Incidentally, this same thing works for OpenBSD. I was playing around with that on my own iMac for a little while.

--saint

Re:Netcraft now confirms.. *BSD is dying

[dankow]

Before anyone moderates this down any more, you should look at this person's history. Then you'll see that what appears to be the post of a troll is actually just dry sarcasm. Pretty funny, too.

You know, there's an easier way...

[Dimwit]

...to dual-boot MacOS and BSD. It's called MacOS X.

On an iMac?

[ZigMonty]

What's the point in dual booting NetBSD and MacOS on an iMac? Get MacOSX which has MacOS Classic, all that bsd stuff, x windows if you download it and a whole bunch of other stuff that isn't in the NetBSD+MacOS combo. Now, if it was a machine that didn't support MacOSX I'd understand.

It IS cool that it's possible though.

Re:On an iMac?

[camateg]

My iMac only has 96M RAM, which kind of rules out Mac OS X. I had Darwin on it for a while, but I still prefer NetBSD.

Re:On an iMac?

[trash eighty]

because it can be done and its fun to try.

you're on slashdot, you shouldn't need any more reason. in any point OSX is not exactly ultra fast on a G3 box

Re:On an iMac?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have OS X running on a Rev. A iMac with only 96 Mb and it runs like a charm. I can even run Classic apps. It is not the fastest in the world but I have yet to crash it.

Re:On an iMac?

[klez23]

you know, you can get 256mb of ram for about $30 now, check pricewatch.com...

Re:On an iMac?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you mean well but not all machines take the same kind of RAM. The iMacs up through the 333's used SO-DIMM's and maxed at 128. If this guy has one of those, then he wouldn't gain much by pulling a 32 and replacing it with a 64. More RAM is good advice but not always practical. I have an older PPro board that has 64mb on it because the RAM it takes would cast more than a new board would. I just use it as is for jobs it is suited for and go on with life.

Re:On an iMac?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you have a 350mhz+ G3 OSX runs fine.

Re:On an iMac?

[trash eighty]

well it runs ok on my 350MHz G3 mac but once you open classic it slows down. its fast enough to use OSX but not as fast as OS9 which is the problem

Really? tell me howYou know, there's an easier way

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's CEO said that any machine sold by Apple after 1997 would run the NEw OS (Mac OS X). Yet, it won't run on my TAM.

How are YOU able to get a TAM to run MacOSX?

I've ported NetBSD to my toaster !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I need to figure out a way to access the command line...

Re:I've ported NetBSD to my toaster !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this once too. While visiting China this past summer I found a DeLonghi toaster and a copy of NetBSD. What I ended up doing was writing a small sh script and embeding it in the bread that I put in the toaster. Go ahead and see if that works if not....

Might be useful...

[Kadin2048]

A setup like this might be very useful for developers and others involved in porting particularly tricky bits of BSD code to OS X. (Running NetBSD and OS X, instead of Classic, obviously.) Especially if the different OSes can access each others' partitions, it might make troubleshooting easier.

It's definately a cool setup...and interesting that OS X makes it both less useful but potentially more useful at the same time.

Re:Might be useful...

[Phroggy]

Especially if the different OSes can access each others' partitions, it might make troubleshooting easier.

Mac OS X can read UFS partitions natively. You can install to a UFS root volume, but apparently there are a couple of bugs with some apps running on UFS, and classic Mac OS can't read UFS, so it's not recommended for average users.

One of the biggest noticeable differences: UFS is case-sensitive; HFS+ is case-insensitive (although it does preserve case). This means two files whose names differ only by case cannot exist in the same directory. This breaks some UNIX stuff that expects "Makefile" and "makefile" to be two different files; on HFS+ they are the same file.