Re: Debian Installer on PowerPC
On Sat, May 22, 2004 at 07:38:09AM +1000, James Buchanan wrote:
> Please excuse my ignorance, but someone said to me "nobody ever runs
> anything but the MacOS on a Macintosh." If this is so, then what
> machines do the PowerPC Debian distributions run on?
Macintoshes. I'm typing this on one right now. :-) And a number of other
systems too, such as a number of IBM boxes.
While there are occasionally a few problems with very new Mac hardware -
my laptop's built-in wireless probably won't be supported in the near to
medium future, for instance, so I have to use a PCMCIA card instead, and
sleep support isn't yet implemented for its graphics card - IMHO they
generally make very nice Linux machines indeed and most of the hardware
is well-supported.
> Is it possible to load up the PowerPC bootable CD image in one of
> those colourful iMacs and install?
Yup.
> The software manual from IBM says it's a 32/64-bit machine. I'm
> thinking of buying an iMac, 333MHz PowerPC G3 machine. Is it 32 or
> 64-bit?
32-bit. FWIW, G4 systems are quite affordable now, but a G3 should be
usable too.
> Where is the documentation for PowerPC architectures, in terms of how
> the system boots and such? I have the software manual from IBM, but it
> doesn't detail anything about the BIOS or getting the machine
> bootstrapped. I'd like to refer to this while studying the source code
> for the PowerPC architecture-specific parts.
The best concise documentation of the PowerMac boot process I've seen is
the bootstrap(8) manual page from the yaboot package on
www.penguinppc.org.
> Also, if you're a ppc hacker, please let me know of any useful books
> on ppc assembly language programming you've used.
I'm not a PPC hacker at that level, unfortunately.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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