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Installation of Debian on iMac DV 400Mhz



Hi,

I don't really know where to start, so forgive me if it looks as if I'm just
"diving in" with a load of ramblings.

I have recently freed up an iMac DV 400Mhz machine, and I was very keen to
put Debian on it. I downloaded the CD images, burned them onto CD and
printed off the installation instructions.

To cut a long story short, I had an absolute nightmare. I have many years'
experience with Debian (I am a very passionate advocate) on i386, but the
PPC install completely stumped me.

These are the things I had problems with:

Partitioning - The "drive setup" tool under MacOS seems to be the only tool
that everybody will have access to that succeeds in partitioning the drive
correctly. The links to 'mac-fdisk' on the Debian installation pages are
simply links to the man page, which is a terrible thing to do to a newbie.

Booting from the CD-ROMs - simply does not work on my model of iMac, and I
suspect that this will be the case for most iMacs that have undergone the
firmware upgrade necessary for MacOS X or MacOS 9.1.

Booting from Yaboot - Again, MacOS X/9.1 require a firmware upgrade and I
think this prevents the Yaboot installer from working.

Now I'm no big PPC-head, but I thought that Debian would be /easier/ to
install on an iMac because of the more predictable nature of the hardware. I
struggled for days, flicking between Debian installation instructions,
Yellowdoglinux and linuxppc before I finally got the thing to work.

Now, I have a lovely 192Mb 400MHz PPC with Debian 2.2(.latest, whatever that
is). It asks as an always-on Postgresql server, squid proxy, apache + PHP
web server. It's so quiet (no fan) and the aesthetics of an iMac in my house
beat the pants of an ugly PC!

What I'd like to do is offer a simple crib-sheet for other people to use -
an installation "script" if you like. I can detail all the things I had to
do, in the order I had to do them, and I'd mention tips and tricks that
aren't mentioned in the existing Debian documentation (like booting from the
CD in OpenFirmware).

I've not got bags of time to spare, so the document would have to be "this
is how to install Debian on an iMac DV 400Mhz with a slot-loading DVD".
Fairly limited audience, but I think that there would be a non-trivial
number of potential Debian users out there that gave up long before I did.

Kind regards,

Bern



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