- After booting the installer from the CD image, drop into the shell.
- Use pdisk to create an Apple_HFS partition for the boot loader and two Apple_UNIX_SVR2 partitions, one for the root file system and another for swap.
- Run sysinst and install the system. When asked to repartition the disk, just say Use existing partition sizes.
- Once the system is installed, drop again into the shell before rebooting.
- Mount your hard disk into /mnt and chroot into it.
- Fetch a copy of pkgsrc.
- Install the sysutils/hfsutils package.
- Use hformat to create a new HFS file system in the Apple_HFS partition we created.
- Mount the installation CD.
- Copy, using hcopy, the ofwboot.xcf file from the CD to the boot partition.
- Reboot.
- Drop into the OpenFirmware setup (Command+Option+P+R).
- Set boot-device to hd:,ofwboot.xcf.
- Set boot-file to netbsd.
- And here is the tricky thing to get the machine to auto-boot: Set boot-command to ." hello" cr " screen" output boot, not mac-boot.
I found the last command somewhere on the Internet (dunno where now), but, supposedly, a regular mac-boot should have worked. In fact, it works if you call this command from the prompt, but not during automatic boot. (It turns out to be a problem with the version of OpenFirmware I have.)
Just writing down the steps in case I need them later on. Installing Debian stable was much, much easier, but the installer for testing crashes every day with a different error, so I gave up.
(Oh, by the way, I did the same installation into an old PowerMac G3 and that was really painful. The machine refused to boot from any of the CDs I tried and the prebuilt kernels hang during initialization due to a bogus driver. In the end: netbooting and using custom kernels.)
