7.1. The Moment of Truth
| Chapter 7. Booting Into Your New Ubuntu System |

## 7.1. The Moment of Truth

Your system's first boot on its own power is what electrical engineers call the “smoke test”.

If the system fails to start up correctly, don't panic. If the installation was successful, chances are good that there is only a relatively minor problem that is preventing the system from booting Ubuntu. In most cases such problems can be fixed without having to repeat the installation. One available option to fix boot problems is to use the installer's built-in rescue mode (see Section 8.7, “Recovering a Broken System”).

### 7.1.1. NewWorld PowerMacs

On G4 machines and iBooks, you can hold down the option key and get a graphical screen with a button for each bootable OS, Ubuntu will be a button with a small penguin icon.

If you kept MacOS and at some point it changes the OpenFirmware `boot-device` variable you should reset OpenFirmware to its default configuration. To do this hold down the command+option+p+r keys while cold booting the machine.

The labels defined in `yaboot.conf` will be displayed if you press the Tab key at the `boot:` prompt.

Resetting OpenFirmware on G3 or G4 hardware will cause it to boot Ubuntu by default (if you correctly partitioned and placed the Apple_Bootstrap partition first). If you have Ubuntu on a SCSI disk and MacOS on an IDE disk this may not work and you will have to enter OpenFirmware and set the `boot-device` variable, ybin normally does this automatically.

After you boot Ubuntu for the first time you can add any additional options you desire (such as dual boot options) to `/etc/yaboot.conf` and run ybin to update your boot partition with the changed configuration. Please read the yaboot HOWTO for more information.

Chapter 7. Booting Into Your New Ubuntu System |  | 7.2. Mounting encrypted volumes