Installing FreeBSD from CD

[Garance A Drosihn]

Way back on August 26/2004, Peter Grehan wrote:
>Hi Ed,
>
>>Okay. I booted from the cd and it stopped at the 'mountroot>'
>>prompt. What do I enter here -- it is supposed to take the
>>form of 'cd9660:acd0' but there  isn't any such device. Should
>>this be my Mac partition, my Linux partition (which I'll convert
>>to FreeBSD), or my CDROM? And how (from Mac OS X) do I determine
>>what I need to enter?
>
>  You've got it right; you should be able to enter 'cd9660:acd0'
>at the mountroot prompt. Actually, you should be able to hold
>down the 'c' key at boot time with that CD image.

I thought I would try to install FreeBSD/PPC on a spare PowerMac
that I have.  It is a PowerMac G4 (AGP graphics), 500 MHz.  It has
768 Meg of RAM.  I can not seem to get the machine to boot up off
of the CD.  I hold down the 'C' key, and it basically just locks
up.  The video never comes on, nothing seems to happen.  The same
machine can boot up off of standard Apple installation CD's, when
I hold down the 'C' key.

I also have a G4 Cube.  I took the same CD, and I was able to boot up
the Cube with it.  Unfortunately I am still using that cube for other
purposes, so I don't want to install FreeBSD on it.  But I was able
to boot the CD up into single-user mode.  It looked very promising.

The first PowerMac does have a few other odd issues, so the problem
might be hardware.  There is some hardware-shuffling I could try to
fix the problems, but I first want to know if you would *expect*
the August snapshot to work on this hardware?  If not, then I won't
waste my time on that shuffling.

I tried checking the web pages before asking here, but the pages at
http://www.FreeBSD.org/platforms/ppc.html seem to be way out-of-date.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu