Since there doesn't appear to be any obvious answer to this, and since it sounds to me like a newbie question, I thought I'd post the question here in parallel with my attempts to dig this info out of the docs I've managed to find online, to see if it would come faster this way:

Pegasos PPC machine, Gentoo PPC minimal ISO. Burned onto a CD. Now what? It doesn't offer a boot from CD option anywhere. Do I really need to fool with the firmware command and determine the correct syntax? Looks like I'd 'cd' to 'pci', then 'ls', try to find which IDE device the cdrom is, then cd there, then eventually hopefully be able to use ls on the CD. I've done that, and found the one file in the root folder. Tried using that with the boot command but it didn't boot successfully.

Do I really need to do that, or is there some kind of built-in ISO-9660 support like a simple "boot cdrom" command or something?

I guess the other question is what would the name of the boot image file be on that Gentoo CD?

Can someone give me a hint, just to get me at least started?

Thanks,
Paul

I think it should be sufficient to type:

boot /pci/ide/cdrom <bootfile.img>

SmartFirmware is very easy. You CD and LS like any UNIX system.
It is possible to type "ls hd:0" instead of "ls /pci/ide/disk@0.0;0".
Mostly it will work, but not always. I think it depends on firmware versions.

When you CD and LS between hardware you cannot do anything wrong.

"ls /ide" will show all devices connected to /ide.

When you have Gentoo installed you can set auto-boot and boot-file
in SmartFirmware. Type "printenv" to list all settings. Type F9 to switch
to Hi-Res.

From the Gentoo handbook:
boot cd /boot/pegasos

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-ppc.xml

Thanks guys. And thanks for the link. That's just what I needed.

I figure out how to get the list from ls (and cd), but the file in the root looked like the file system itself, not a boot image, and I couldn't find any others. I'm sure I tried a cd into "boot" and got an error, but perhaps I typed it wrong or wasn't in the root folder or something stupid like that.

Anyhow, thanks for the info and the link to the manual.