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.

Even if you cannot boot from CD-ROM, you can probably install the Ubuntu system components and any packages you want from CD-ROM. Simply boot using a different medium and when it's time to install the operating system, base system, and any additional packages, point the installation system at the CD-ROM drive.

If you have problems booting, see Section 5.4, “Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.

Currently, the only PowerPC subarchitectures that support CD-ROM booting are PReP/CHRP (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 factory default CD/DVD drive.

OldWorld PowerMacs will not boot a Ubuntu CD, because OldWorld computers relied on a Mac OS ROM CD boot driver to be present on the CD, and a free-software version of this driver is not available. All OldWorld systems have floppy drives, so use the floppy drive to launch the installer, and then point the installer to the CD for the needed files.

To boot Ubuntu CD/DVD on Pegasos II machine, hold Esc key immediately after pressing the power-on button, when SmartFirmware prompt appears, type

boot cd install/pegasos

On YDL Powerstation machine, pres s immediately after “Press 's' to enter Open Firmware” message, when SLOF prompt appears type

0 > boot cdrom

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 as described in Section 4.3, “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.

0 > boot hd:x,yaboot

boot:

Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (and probably also a DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP server for automatic network configuration).

The server-side setup to support network booting is described in Section 4.4, “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 Section 3.7.1, “Invoking OpenFirmware”) and use the command

0 > boot enet:0

If this doesn't work, you might have to add the filename like this:

0 > boot enet:0,yaboot

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 .