I have a PowerMac dual 2.0 G5 that I have installed FC6 to. However, when I boot the machine there is a menu with 3 or so boot items (cdrom, network, etc).. But the system throws me into Open Firmware. From there I get the message "type mac-boot" to continue but the keyboard no longer boots.

Configuration is: 1.5 GB RAM, sda is a 120 GB sata drive, sdb is a 160 GB sata drive. Partitions laid out as follows:

sda2 = AppleBoot
sda3 = /
sda4 = 4 GB swap (plan to add more RAM)
sdb2 = /home


Am I missing something here? Do I need to do something fancy in the installer?

This looks very messed up - are you sure fedora is installed already? (See the PPC notes in the fedora release notes:
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/releas...hSpecific.html
... you use open firmware to boot CD1 (or the DVD) to install right?


When you first boot, you shouldn't get a menu at all. If you call a grub menu, it should list a couple of fedora options and one for the mac. Nothing like what you have. (Where did you install GRUB?)

Your partitioning scheme is intriguing:

sda1 (what is on sda1?)
sda2 - apple: fine, macos is on the first available partition as expected.
sda3 - linux root, no prob - sda4 is usually an extended partition.
sda4 - linux swap 2GiB!!! You never need more than the 1 (which is still overkill). The 2xRAM is a rule of thumb, and systems with a great deal of RAm do not need a swap partition at all. (I ran FC4 with 512+128MiB and no swap for simply ages.) In fact, swap will slow you down.

sdb1 linux home partition: heyy great - good thinking ahead there.

Some hints:
www.mjmwired.net
www.fedorafaq.org

Yes I installed it myself.

I didn't see an option for it in the usual part of the install process.

Oddly nothing. sda2 is the first one assigned.

I will adjust that.

"didn't see an option for" what?

Probably the thing to do is to use a live CD or the fedora disk in rescue mode (linux rescue at the "boot:" prompt) to check the content of those partitions. If you mount the root partition and look in /boot/grub/ you should see a file called grub.conf ... it will be illustrative to see the content.

Have you read the release notes indicated?
Did you take those issues into account when you installed?

I use FC6 on my Intel desktop at the office. When I install FC6 on an Intel machine there is a GRUB section of the install. The PowerPC version as far as I know uses something called yaboot instead of GRUB so there is no section of the PPC install to configure GRUB.

Oddly, if I do not clear all partitions using the OS X install DVD prior to installing FC I will receive this error at the last stage of the install:

"No valid partition map entry for the partition map" and the whole process fails.

So this time I took this approach:
1) Boot the OS X installer and clear all partition.
2) Select default layout using only one disk
3) Took default package selection

We'll see what happens this time around.

I may try Ubuntu next since it seems to be a pretty popular desktop distro,

At installation:
You use Open Firmware to boot CD1, then yaboot will boot the installer.

There has, historically, been issues getting fedora to boot on 64 bit PPCs. (Such is the G5.) There should be a 64-bit boot.iso in the images/mac64/ directory in CD1. (You are using the 64bit install image aren't you?)

The file you want, instead of grub.conf (my bad), is /etc/yaboot.conf ... so I'm running on the right rails now.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=479273

When OpenFirmware passes control to the bootloader, the bootloader checks the conf file and throws up a menu called (something like) "fedora stage 1 boot". Is this what you see?

This menu typically lists the options; network, CDROM, and OpenFirmware as well as fedora and macOSx. So you don't appear to have enough boot items (there should be two more).

Since the menu generated from entries in yaboot.conf, it seems this is a good place to check.

Going back to a previous question. The sda1 and sdb1 are apparently invisible partition maps. I discovered this through trial and error.

So here is how I got it installed.
1) Boot the CD
2) Once in the installer,I take defaults until I get to disk setup.
3) Set up the disk..
sda1 = invisible partition map
sda2 = 1 MB Apple Bootstrap
sda3 = 256 MB /boot
sda4 = 1 GB swap
sda5 = 106 GB /

I did not set up sdb yet for this run. I will make it /data which is typically how we do it at the office.

Here is my last hitch. I have a dual head Radeon 9600 but the system will not boot if I enable dual-head. The configurator recognizes the card, monitors, and the fact that the card supports dual head. However, the system halts at a black screen with a mouse pointer. I am sure I can SSH into it and kill X but I am curious as to why the dual head config causes this problem.

/home was in an invisible partition huh?
On other folks systems I see sda1 as "apple" and sda2 as macOSx ... so I figured some sort of vendor partition.

Dual head performance depends heavily on how it is set up and what the monitors are etc etc.

Radeon cards will often produce a black screen as X loads. However, this should go away within a few seconds. I take it you've waited longer...

There is a bug which sounds like this:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9206

... try upgrading everything via yum to see if a decent patch has been added. (Otherwise you may have to use the patch, use only single head, or downgrade X.)

Check out the links in post #2

Sorry
/dev/sdb1 is the invisible partition map
/dev/sdb2 is home
/dev/sda1 is the invisible partition map
/dev/sda2 is the Apple boot partition
/dev/sda3 is /boot
/dev/sda4 is swap
/dev/sda5 is /

Tweaking the xorg.conf file fixed this for me. The only other problem I am experiencing is that FC6 is installing borth 32 bit and 64 bit versions of certain apps (Firefox being one of them) so the launcher does not work unless I uninstall one of the two version. This is kind of frustrating. Aside from that it's all working.