Installation report and plans for oldworld power macintoshes

[Jeremie Koenig <sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org>]

Hello,

I just finished a sarge installation on OldWorld pmac, using the woody
miboot boot-floppy-hfs.bin and a home-built kernel. I'm now going to try
to use this system to get floppy images building for oldworld powermac
ASAP, the ultimate goal being to get beta2/ppc support oldworld.

My TODO-list for the next days :
      - add the floppy image type for powerpc to the build directory,
	using the "-small" powerpc kernel (the big one won't fit on a
	floppy.) I guess separate boot floppies will be needed for
	different subarches ;
      - produce a quik-installer udeb ;
      - try to make the commented subarch code in anna come to life, in
	order to get a suitable bootloader for one's subarch.

If anyone has ideas about the above things, please speak now.

Here is the installation report :

INSTALL REPORT

Debian-installer-version:
      - home-built kernel, with all needed drivers built-in.
      - Ppc daily-built netboot-initrd.gz 2004-01-12
uname -a: Linux debian-ppc 2.4.22 [build ref] ppc unknown
Date: Today, 2004-01-14 ~21:00:00
Method:
      - Put my home-built kernel on a miboot floppy
      - Hand-edited miboot's resource fork to remove video=ofonly and add
        devfs=mount to the kernel arguments.
      - Copied netboot-initrd.gz to a floppy, and booted the whole thing.

Machine: Power Macintosh 8500/120 (OldWorld)
Processor: PowerPC 604, 120Mhz, rev. 3.3
Memory: 80 Mb
Root Device: SCSI, approx. 1 Gb
Root Size/partition table:
      Apple partition table, ~1 Gb total, ~900 Mb root filesystem
      and ~100 Mb swap.
Output of lspci:
      Mesh and 53c94 scsi controlers, Mace built-in ethernet, "control"
      display adapter.

Base System Installation Checklist:

Initial boot worked:    [O] (my own hacked floppy, doesn't count)
Configure network HW:   [O] (driver in the kernel, doesn't count)
Config network:         [O]
Detect CD:              [ ]
Load installer modules: [O]
Detect hard drives:     [O] (driver in the kernel, doesn't count)
Partition hard drives:  [O]
Create file systems:    [O]
Mount partitions:       [O]
Install base system:    [E] 1.
Install boot loader:    [E] 2.
Reboot:                 [E] 3.
[O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it

Comments/Problems:

No working kernel, but Sven Luther has just uploaded a working version to
unstable. A linux-kernel-di upload will be needed, too. No floppy images, but
i hope to get these building ASAP.

1. Install base system

Once the hardware and kernel problems were resolved, everything worked quite
well, but debootstrap failed beacause libgnutls7 wouldn't configure (depended
on libopencdk8, which wasn't installed. I installed sarge.) "apt-get -f
install" fixed the whole thing.

I had to manually edit /var/lib/dpkg/status to tag base-installer as
configured, since i couldn't force the step to be skipped otherwise.

2. Install boot loader

I was (unsurprisingly) proposed yaboot as a bootloader, with no alternatives.
But yaboot won't boot oldworld. I tried it nevertheless, to see if yaboot
would realize it and warn me, but it complained about having no bootstrap
partition. The need for one will need to be over-stressed in the installation
manual, as I can imagine the face of someone who realizes he has to restart
installation from scratch, while he thought it was finished.

I chrooted in /target, manually installed quik, and rebooted. And it worked !

3. Reboot

I couldn't login, although root's pw field in /etc/passwd was empty. I launched
the installer again, chroot-set a root password and everything was ok.

-- 
Jeremie Koenig <sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org>