But when you get to the step of partitioning/initializing/mounting
your hard drive, the kernel you get from
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/current/new-powermac/
will tell you "No hard disks were found." If you look at /dev/hda
you'll see that it's your optical drive. The problem is that this
disk is ATA-100, and the current kernels are only for ATA-66. I had
to build a kernel that supported ATA-100, but I still don't know what
chipset this machine is using (anybody?) so I just added them all --
not an elegant solution, but it works. It makes for a 3.8 MB kernel
image, but you can download it at
http://valla.uchicago.edu/ppc/vmlinux-pbg412.bz2 (you probably need to
bunzip2 it for it to boot).
So put my kernel (or your own-built kernel with the right ATA chipset
support, as long as you tell me what it is) in /vmlinux on your OS X
partition, reboot with cmd+opt+O+F, boot hd:3,yaboot or whatever is
right (you could tell me this as well, if people are going to refer to
my web page or this email thread). From there things should be okay
-- the hard drive is /dev/hdc, and you can read the packages off the
CD just fine, even if you can't boot from it. After you install, you
should boot to OS X, change OSX:/yaboot.conf to point at your GNU root
partition and remove the line about root.bin, then reboot with
hd:3,yaboot or whatever (still from the OS X partition).