Re: OldWorld ROM Macintoshes

Hi Jeff,

On 9/2/25 12:04 PM, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 1:46 PM Stan Johnson <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     On 9/1/25 6:58 PM, Cedar Maxwell wrote:
>     >
>     > ...
>     > My drive appears to already be essentially formatted the same, except
>     > you have additional partitions for your various other OS's
> 
>     My Wallstreet drive was initialized in Mac OS X (Panther), so it has
>     additional Apple driver partitions.
> 
>     > and I have an additional partition for GRUB (to prevent the Debian
>     > installer from complaining, but maybe I should try again without
>     this).
> 
>     I think you should not have a GRUB partition on a Wallstreet. Not only
>     does GRUB not work on the Wallstreet, but GRUB doesn't work on any
>     PowerPC system that also needs to boot Mac OS or Mac OS X. I use yaboot
>     on any PowerMac system that also boot Mac OS or Mac OS X. I use GRUB
>     for
>     testing on one Pismo that boots only Debian or Gentoo.
> 
> 
> I believe the path forward is GRUB2, not Yaboot. According to Adrian,
> Yaboot is no longer maintained. See
> <https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2022/03/msg00039.html>.
> 
> Jeff


Is GRUB2 supported on the Wallstreet? Regardless of whether yaboot is
still supported, it still works, though I think it requires ext3
filesystems instead of ext4. And Yaboot is the only option for the
PowerBook Lombard, which despite being NewWorld does not support GRUB.

There was a disccussion on this mailing list a while ago about how to
make GRUB work on PowerMac systems (G3, G4, G5) to boot Mac OS 9 and Mac
OS X in addition to Linux, but I don't know whether those changes ever
made it up to the GRUB developers (?). Meanwhile, yaboot continues to
support booting from Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, CD, and Linux.

-Stan Johnson