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 the section called “Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.

Currently, the only PowerPC subarchitectures that support CD-ROM booting are PReP (though not all systems) 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 the section called “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

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 the section called “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.

Currently, NewWorld PowerMac systems are known to support USB booting.

Make sure you have prepared everything from the section called “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 the section called “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:

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.

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 the section called “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 the section called “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 net:server_ipaddr,file,client_ipaddr. On some PReP systems (e.g. Motorola PowerStack machines) the command help boot may give a description of syntax and available options.

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 .