Confusion over dual booting

[orlandold]

I will highly appreciate the clarification or assistance that can be provided with the following:

I have a Powerbook G4 1.6ghz 15" with 2gb of RAM, currently running on Mac OS X 10.5.6.

I wish to install Fedora PPC on it, and also keep Leopard.

Considering the above, I understand that I need to repartition my HardDrive, as to have a partition ready for Fedora PPC.

I already downloaded the Fedora PPC dvd, and I am ready to move forward with the repartition of the disk, followed by the installation of Mac OS X on one partition, as to then install Fedora on the other partition.

Since I wish to be able to dual boot, I want to know if Fedora PPC install DVD takes care of the boot menu, so that I am able to afterwards select which operating system is to boot????

I can't see to find a clear answer to my question anywhere.

Thanks

[DoctorJLowe]

The answer to your question is, mostly. Fedora installs the 'yaboot' boot loader as part of the install process. After the initial grey boot screen, yaboot puts up a black text interface, in which you have, IIRC, 20 seconds to choose which boot to put on. Typing an 'l' here starts linux, 'x' starts OSX, etc. Fedora pre-configures items to boot from the optical drive, OpenFirmware, etc. - items that many other distros make you add yourself. Note that when the given time is up [the amount of time is configurable], yaboot will start whichever OS is considered the default. Anyway, the default OS as installed is Fedora. If you prefer Leopard for day to day computing, you can make that change as follows:

1) From the Terminal, enter 'su -c nano /etc/yaboot.conf'. You can use another text editor if you have a favorite.

2) Move the cursor on a blank line [the order is not important here] and add this: 'defaultos=macosx'.

3) Type ctrl-o to save the file, hit return to accept the file name, then hit ctrl-x to quit nano.

4) The raw yaboot.conf file needs to be converted into binary form to be usable: 'su -c ybin -v'.

[orlandold]

excellent! thanks for your reply! I was able to install F9 with your help, and the post of ZantiOSX on another thread.