Miro,
please compile some notes on what you had to add to the initrd, and what changes were necessary after installation. Even if none of that ever makes it into the installer bugfixes, it would help anyone trying to install Debian on the CT60.
Last I heard of someone attempting to use systemd on the CT60, it was too slow and continued to time out. That was 10 years or more ago, so some issues appear to have been fixed in the meantime.
You'll likely hit the same timeouts due to slow crypto code again when using ssh - public key authentication (and the simplest crypto algorithms supported) was the only way for me. There used to be 060 optimized crypto libraries that could speed up logins a great deal, but AFAIR they used hand optimized assembly for crypto primitives. Not sure letting the compiler optimize for 060 can achieve near as much speedup.
The keymap issue is a long standing problem - that should be reported to the installer team as a bugfix (same as the missing modules).
Cheers,
Michael
On Sat, 18 Jul 2026 at 00:39, Michael Schmitz <schmitzmic@gmail.com> wrote:I'm sure that would be a lot easier (unless FreeMINT has introduced endianness issues).
It was. But of course I had to prepare another initrd because the default one didn't contain ext4.ko and jbd2.ko. :)
So, after that I was finally able to finish the installation but oh dear, was it a long one. Against Debian 3.1, Debian 12's netinst.iso is twice as big but the installation time was 30 minutes vs. ... I don't know, several hours (I let it run during the night). And that was with TT RAM enabled!
Another hiccup was booting the installed system: since the default kernel doesn't contain pata_falcon.ko, libata.ko, ext4.ko and jbd2.ko, I had to boot into the installer again, take initrd.img from my installed partition, copy to FreeMiNT's ext2 partition, then copy it to TOS GEMDOS partition, then add -r to bootargs (unlike 2.2.25) and after that I was able to see the login prompt after a long series of debug messages. Funny to see systemd on my Falcon. :)
Could I log into the system after all? Of course not. :) This took another couple of hours: by default, Debian 12 uses yescrypt for password hashes. yescrypt is so heavy that even 60s is not enough for verifying my password so after entering login+password I was welcomed with ... a restarted login prompt because the kernel killed the login process for taking 100% CPU time for one minute. :)
So a happy end but oh dear, Debian 3.1 was a breeze in comparison to this. I have one last item on my TODO and that is trying a build from Geert's branch so I can see my NetUSBee alive.
P.S. I could also observe a few minor oddities like "shutdown" actually not shutting down the CT60 or that after a while (that happened in both the installer and the installed system), IKBD packets are interpreted somewhat... weirdly. For instance UP arrow doesn't work anymore, I have to use INSERT. shell history's UP arrow also doesn't work and if I use CTRL+P, I have to go RIGHT if I want to move the cursor LEFT.--