OpenBSD: December 2008 Archives

I've been trying to get OpenBSD 4.4 up and running on an old'ish PowerBook I had to rebuild recently. This is one of the last 15" G4 series PowerBooks Apple made. The basic specs are the 1.0 GHz G4 PowerPC processor, 1GB of RAM, DVI, 1gbps Ethernet, 80GB drive, etc. (If you wish, you can stop reading the story part of this post here. Go to the last paragraph if you are simply checking how I got OpenBSD to work as a second OS on the PowerBook.) Running Leopard (OS X 10.5) was frustrating, as it was slow (especially compared to my newer Intel based MacBook Pro) and I really don't have a use for OS X unless it runs fast on a portable machine. At the end of the day, I am using this machine to check email, surf the net and muck around with OpenBSD related issues I have with a small server farm I'm responsible for managing. Considering the machine is in fantastic condition, it would be sad to let it sit on a desk somewhere and collect dust. The problem was that I have spent the last two days trying to get OpenBSD 4.4 running and while the installation went as smooth as would be expected (I rarely have problems with OpenBSD's install process), regardless of whether or not I left the drive formatted MBR or HFS style (i.e. using a boot map that is typical for Intel/AMD machines vs. using Apple's Open Firmware style boot sector), I just could not get OpenBSD to boot. That was, until I read the directions more closely...