HowTo: Install freebsd-ppc on a g4 mac mini?

[Oliver Lietz]

Am Freitag, 28. September 2007 schrieb Cypher Frost:
> Has anyone written a detailed how-to for installing the PPC port of FreeBSD
> onto a g4 mac mini as the only OS?
>
> I want to use a mini to replace my current BSD server due to it's small
> size. However, I've been finding issues regarding the OpenFirmware that
> boots the mac. I've seen that it only reads HFS+ partitions and that fdisk
> does not work on the PPC port...
>
> So is there a detailed set of instructions on how to do this? I've seen
> http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/iso_install.txt but It's not horribly
> detailed. If I do make the change to FreeBSD on a mac mini, it'll be the
> only OS and I'd rather not have to boot into the openfirmware everytime I
> need to reboot the box.
>
> If anyone has done this and can give me a step-by-step of their experience,
> it would be greatly appreciated.

Hello,

not a detailed how-to but some hints:
You can boot the Mini in target mode and create the partitions from another 
Mac with pdisk - first one HFS+, others UFS (your preferred BSD partition 
layout: /, swap, tmp, ...).
Create a boot.tbxi file, see below (without #s). Copy the loader from your 
FreeBSD install CD and the boot.tbxi to your HFS+ partition.
Reboot the Mini and install FreebBSD from CD, create new file systems with 
sysinstall on your UFS partitions. Finish setup and reboot.
On next boot enter OFW and change some settings like below:

boot-device hd:2,\boot.tbxi
boot-file boot.tbxi
boot-command boot

You should reboot after changing settings in OFW (search the web for more 
details on changing settings in OFW).
This is straight from memory and some notes. AFAIR you can drop boot.tbxi and 
use loader directly - can't say for sure as I had to reinstall Mac OS for 
some tests on my Cubes.
If someone is interested in a detailed how-to I will create one next time I 
install FreeBSD on my Cubes (will wait until release of 7.0 though).

O.

#### boot.tbxi ####
<CHRP-BOOT>
<COMPATIBLE>
MacRISC MacRISC3 MacRISC4
</COMPATIBLE>
<DESCRIPTION>
FreeBSD/PPC bootloader
</DESCRIPTION>
<BOOT-SCRIPT>
" screen" output
boot hd:2,\loader hd:3
</BOOT-SCRIPT>
</CHRP-BOOT>
###################