Hey guys,

I recently got my 1.67 G4 Powerbook to triple boot (OSX10.4, Lubuntu, MorphOS) and was a bit unhappy with how things turned out and am now blowing everything away and starting over. This time, my intent is to quad boot OSX10.4, OSX10.5, Lubuntu, and MorphOS. Has anyone else been successful in multiboot setups?

It ain't super easy or straightforward but...it is a bit of fun. :P

I like my dual boot approach:
internal hd host MorphOS, external Firewire drive OS X.
Bootselector is the firewire cable.
It's easy, it's clean. It has also the advantage that I use the external HD with the very same OS X installation on my Mac mini as well as on my Powerbook.

I have simply installed OSx first and left some space for MorphOS, which I installed later. I placed the boot.img and the boot script on the HFS+ partition to avoid wasting more space, as at that time only 160GB were available in 2.5".

Today I would go for a >400GB drive, because when installing three OSs, 160GB are far to small, when you actually want to use them.

I have also installed in that way that I've had MorphOS first, and then made some space and installed OSX later. I think I had to create HFS partition on MorphOS for to find/use (and convert it to HFS+) in OSX... OSX partitioner was a bit picky about in which way the space for it was made. IIRC trying to install it on totally empty space didn't work as wanted... but making HFS and then converting it to HFS+ did the trick IIRC (should have made some notes, but anyway I've succeeded in it twice).

I currently have two machines with two MorphOS installations (own boot image partitions to show them on the Apple boot menu) and one OSX installation (makes three options in the Apple boot menu).

Then on one machine I have also several MorphOS installations, but only one boot image partition for booting directly into OS, but then second boot image partition for custom boot menu to select different options to boot into MorphOS or other MorphOS installations.

But all my multi-boot experiences have been with MorphOS and/or OSX, I have no idea about those other operating systems and what they need.

I've installed Lubuntu xenail 16.04 and am having a handful of issues which make it pretty frustrating to use. Radeon problems, screen brightness problems, and dismally supported updates...but hey, getting some mileage out of that powerbook :)

Have you guys heard of MacOnLinux? Evidently you can use it kms style to run OSX (and even OS9) directly from within Linux while on PPC hardware. Gonna give it a shot tomorrow.

> I placed the boot.img and the boot script on the HFS+ partition

How does the MorphOS update process cope with this, considering that MorphOS can't write to HFS+?

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Many MorphOS users did use it at Pegasos times, but it's a bit forgotten way now when we got real Mac HW to run OSX directly on its own.

On my G5 I got a multi-boot-setup with 1 x MorphOS and 4 x Linux (2 x Ubuntu kernels, 2 x Gentoo kernels). yaboot as boot-manager is a PITA (needs an extra ext2-partition for the Linux kernels nowadays) and most of the time fiddling with the config-file. But once you got it set up it runs decent. Multiple Linux kernels or partitions can be set up with ease.

The problem is that for foreign OS there are only two boot options, macos=partition and macosx=partition. With only 2 options MorphOS + Mac OS X will work, but adding an additional Mac OS X will be hard. To do that you will have to edit the files which yaboot creates on the HFS-boot-partition directly.

But you already do run Linux, maybe it's less hassle and a much more proper solution to run GRUB2 as boot manager. Haven't tried it myself, but learned a time ago this works actually! Klick

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Yeah, Radeon problems on Linux/PPC... I think meanwhile I know them all.

If you have problems with desktop lockups or freezing you have to use a /etc/X11/xorg.conf with Option "NoAccel" "true". (Bug)

If you want mesa/3D-acceleration working you need to use (L)Ubuntu MATE 16.10 or greater. Though the colours are somtimes wrong. (Bug) Versions >= 16.10 are better anyhow since many PPC-specific bugs got fixed since kernel 4.4.x-series. 16.10 uses 4.8.x-series.

Strangely the Radeon in my PowerBook G4 5,8 works out of the box without problems, the very similar Radeon in a PowerBook G4 5,6 does not.

[ Editiert durch ernsteiswuerfel 11.01.2017 - 11:08 ]

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Shameless BootMonster plug :P

I've also further modified BootMonster to create a hybrid boot system that allows booting from any ISO and any boot.img, but stores a version-specific prefs folder on the hard-disk to allow desktop, snapshots, and various prefs to be saved (more than just what is stored in env:). Description & how-to here.

They both need a more user-friendly way to generate the scripts than editing text files though.

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Since I have no hfs partition the update process does not work at all with my setup.

I have for this method. I create hfs hardfile 10MB with boot.img.
After mount file.

Now update proces is possible.