The easiest route for most people will be to use an Ubuntu CD. If you have a CD, and if your machine supports booting directly off the CD, great! Simply insert your CD, reboot, and proceed to the next chapter.
Note that certain CD drives may require special drivers, and thus be inaccessible in the early installation stages. If it turns out the standard way of booting off a CD doesn't work for your hardware, revisit this chapter and read about alternate kernels and installation methods which may work for you.
If you have problems booting, see Section 5.3, “Troubleshooting the Install Process”.
Currently, the only PowerPC subarchitectures that support CD-ROM booting are PReP and New World PowerMacs. On PowerMacs, hold the c key, or else the combination of Command, Option, Shift, and Delete keys together while booting to boot from the CD-ROM.
If your system doesn't boot directly from CD-ROM, you can still use the CD-ROM to install the system. On NewWorlds, you can also use an OpenFirmware command to boot from the CD-ROM manually. Follow the instructions in Section 5.1.2.1, “Booting NewWorld Macs from OpenFirmware” for booting from the hard disk, except use the path to yaboot on the CD at the OF prompt, such as
0 > boot cd:,\install\yaboot
Booting from an existing operating system is often a convenient option; for some systems it is the only supported method of installation.
To boot the installer from hard disk, you will have already completed downloading and placing the needed files in Section 4.4, “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.
You will have already placed the vmlinux,
initrd.gz, yaboot, and
yaboot.conf files at the root level of your HFS
partition in Section 4.4.2, “Hard Disk Installer Booting for NewWorld Macs”.
Restart the computer, and immediately (during the chime) hold down the
Option, Command (cloverleaf/Apple),
o, and f keys all together. After
a few seconds you will be presented with the Open Firmware prompt.
At the prompt, type
0 > boot hd:x,yaboot
replacing x with the partition number of
the HFS partition where the
kernel and yaboot files were placed, followed by a Enter. On some
machines, you may need to use ide0: instead of
hd:. In a few more seconds you will see a
yaboot prompt
boot:
At yaboot's boot: prompt, type either
install or install video=ofonly
followed by a Enter. The
video=ofonly argument is for maximum
compatibility; you can try it if install
doesn't work. The Ubuntu installation program should start.
Currently, NewWorld PowerMac systems are known to support USB booting.
Make sure you have prepared everything from Section 4.3, “Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting”. To boot a Macintosh system from a USB stick, you will need to use the Open Firmware prompt, since Open Firmware does not search USB storage devices by default. To get to the prompt, hold down Command-Option-o-f all together while booting (see Section 3.6.1, “Invoking OpenFirmware”).
You will need to work out where the USB storage device appears in the
device tree, since at the moment ofpath cannot work
that out automatically. Type dev / ls and
devalias at the Open Firmware prompt to get a
list of all known devices and device aliases. On the author's system
with various types of USB stick, paths such as
usb0/disk, usb0/hub/disk,
/pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1, and
/pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/hub@1/disk@1 work.
Having worked out the device path, use a command like this to boot the installer:
bootusb0/disk:2,\\:tbxi
The 2 matches the Apple_HFS or
Apple_Bootstrap partition onto which you copied the boot image earlier,
and the ,\\:tbxi part instructs Open Firmware to
boot from the file with an HFS file type of "tbxi" (i.e.
yaboot) in the directory previously blessed with
hattrib -b.
The system should now boot up, and you should be presented with the
boot: prompt. Here you can enter optional boot
arguments, or just hit Enter.
This boot method is new, and may be difficult to get to work on some NewWorld systems. If you have problems, please file an installation report, as explained in Section 5.3.4, “Submitting Installation Reports”.
Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP).
The installation method to support network booting is described in Section 4.5, “Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting”.
Currently, PReP and New World PowerMac systems support netbooting.
On machines with Open Firmware, such as NewWorld Power Macs, enter the
boot monitor (see Section 3.6.1, “Invoking OpenFirmware”) and
use the command boot enet:0. PReP and CHRP boxes
may have different ways of addressing the network. On a PReP machine,
you should try
boot .
server_ipaddr,file,client_ipaddr
Many older Apple monitors used a 640x480 67Hz mode. If your video
appears skewed on an older Apple monitor, try appending the boot
argument video=atyfb:vmode:6 , which will
select that mode for most Mach64 and Rage video hardware. For Rage 128
hardware, this changes to
video=aty128fb:vmode:6 .