Re: Installing Debian using debian-sarge-netinst.iso (powerpc)
Hi all.
As the person who started this thread it's about time I responded! First of all, though it hardly matters, my machine is a G4 desktop, not a laptop. I have overcome my partitioning problems and have seemingly successfully employed the Debian Installer twice now.
The first time I did it in 'trust mode', (my terminology), and it worked without a hitch. I then decided to install emacs and it's dependencies using dselect. It got about half way through before stopping, (cleanly), only for me to find that my keyboard had gone completely haywire. I spent about half an hour trying to type the command 'shutdown -r now' but try as I might I could not find the 's' ! I pulled the plug and rebooted but no change. Hence my second attempt at using the installer.
This time I ran it in 'expert mode' and again it seemed to run without a hitch. I chose not to install any packages, shutdown cleanly and went to bed. However, the following day it hung at 'Detecting hardware' on boot up, and has hanged there ever since.
Perhaps it's going to be a case of third time lucky! The sarge-netinst.iso I'm using was built on 14th Jan so perhaps this problem has already been addressed.
sebyte
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Please post your reply to the list without CC'ing me.
If you do I will only get your mesage twice.
In reply to all your comments:
Derrik Pates - First of all thanks for taking the time to comprehensively address each of my questions in turn.
As was mentioned in another reply, you shouldn't try to do the partitioning through Apple's Disk Utility. IMHO, it's terrible, not to mention it wastes big chunks of space between partitions for no discernable reason at all.
128 MB to be precise! There must be a reason. Surely...
I don't believe you'll be able to write to a MacOS/OpenStep UFS filesystem from Linux anyway.
Read only support is OK for now. All I'm hoping is to be able to access my sizeable mp3 collection from Debian when I am up and running.
You have to make an 800KB (1600 block) partition of type Apple_Bootstrap for yaboot to install itself into. If you don't do this, you won't be able to boot Linux on your Powerbook. (I think that's actually mentioned in the Debian install guide for PowerPC - did you read it?) [...] Also, after you've set up the MacOS X partition, and got it all happy, do the rest of the partition in Linux using mac-fdisk.
I've sussed this. I knew I needed one, I just didn't know how to create it. In fact, the first couple of times I booted up from the CD, I didn't know it was mac-fdisk I was using. I had even read about mac-fdisk but with nothing to indicate which actual program the installer is running I don't see how I was supposed to know this. The 'branden-ibook' link, (that I mentioned in an earlier post), made everything clear.
Why are you splitting your main filesystem into partitions? Especially "/boot, /tmp, /var, /usr, /home, etc." all on one partition? That's a very poor layout, really. Better to just go with one FS for your root, one for the exchange partition, one for OS X, the 800 KB bootstrap partition, and your swap partition.
I think I am right in saying that for a partition to be bootable it must include /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib, /mnt, /root and /sbin. It seems to me that /home, /opt, /var, /tmp and /usr should ideally all have their own partitions. I was thinking more along the lines of creating one small bootable 'root' partition and putting everything else on one large second partition thus eliminating partition sizing issues).
I'm not saying that multiple partitions is a bad thing, but stuffing a whole bunch of subtrees on one filesystem right away, as I said before, is silly, and I really think you shouldn't do it.
In the light of the above rationale, would you still argue that this is silly?
Go with ext3. If the system crashes, or whatever, you don't have to sit and wait while fsck runs on the filesystem.
Thanks for the tip.
S. Keeling - I have to agree with Klaus Ita. There's no point attacking someone who is only trying to help. Having said that, I am pleased to hear that I am not alone in my understanding that a filesystem hierarchy distributed across multiple partitions makes a system more robust. There seem to be many different opinions out there.
To clarify, /usr, /opt, /var, and /home should be separate, and /var
(in Debian) should be big enough to hold logs and a dist-upgrade.
/boot and /tmp shouldn't be separate. On that, we can agree.
Out of interest, why should /boot and /tmp be kept together? Regarding /usr, /opt, /var and /home, see note above and/or a new thread I've started called 'Small and bootable'.
Klaus Ita - I'm afraid your advice is a little over my head at the moment.
You might also want to try mounting different partitions with different
permissions. and then tmp should definitely have a noexec tag and not
share the same [partition] as /boot (ro)
/boot as read only makes perfect sense. /tmp as noexec? Does this mean that files on a 'noexec' partition cannot be executed even if their individual permissions suggest they are executable?
Pau Rul Ian Ferragut -
Really? I thougth ext2 was better [than ext3] because it doesn't write continuously.
I'm quite sure Derrik Pates can answer that question better than I can!
Barry Hawkins -
You mention an exchange partition above. What does that refer to?
I simply wanted to create a partition that MacOSX and Debian could both access for the purposes of exchanging files between the two operating systems in a dual-boot set-up.
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