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Dual Boot NetBSD And MacOS On An iMac

Posted by timothy on from the making-life-less-dangerous dept.

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..."

13 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. What right does he have!!! by acidmaple · · Score: 1

    ...oh yeah

    --

    Capitalism Served Fresh Daily
  2. Having stopped short of the summit, I salute you. by toddpw · · Score: 2, Informative

    "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.

  3. Re:*BSD is dying by toddpw · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  4. iMac and BSD. by saintlupus · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --saint

  5. Re:Netcraft now confirms.. *BSD is dying by dankow · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    I am the hub of Jack's digital lifestyle.
  6. You know, there's an easier way... by Dimwit · · Score: 2, Informative

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

    --
    ...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
  7. On an iMac? by ZigMonty · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:On an iMac? by camateg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:On an iMac? by trash+eighty · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

    3. Re:On an iMac? by klez23 · · Score: 1

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

    4. Re:On an iMac? by trash+eighty · · Score: 1

      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

  8. Might be useful... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    1. Re:Might be useful... by Phroggy · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;