Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
Hello,
I recently inherited several (4) oldworld 7600 Powermacs, one of them
132MHz, the others 120. I have successfully installed woody on one of
them using a boot floppy.
The floppy booting is a *very* erroneous process, I was usually
successful booting from a floppy only after 5-6 tries. In addition two
of the macs have defective floppy drives and I don't want starting
swapping drives. Also once the mac-OS is gone, the boot floppies don't
seem to boot anymore? So this is not a viable option, especially since I
don't have any mac-OS disks to restart a system that doesnt have mac-OS
on the hard drive.
So I think there must be a better way to boot these beasts into a d-i.
I'd really like to contribute my experience with these machines back if
I can get some pointers...
What I've achieved so far:
- Booting into open firmware prompt with a serial line
- Booting a self-compiled kernel off my internal network using bootp.
I've probably set up everything correctly on the server side (I've
successfully done a woody network install with an X86 based IBM X31
laptop with a similar server-side dhcp/tftpd setup) but the open
firmware won't start the kernel. According to messages it initializes
text and data segment but fails on bss. Looks like the BSD people are
able to boot oldworld via network, I'd really like to do this with
linux, too.
Note that a COFF instead of ELF kernel is needed for this to work.
My questions:
- What magic incantations are needed for making open firmware 1.0.5 boot
a linux image across the network?
- What magic incantation do I need for building a kernel (or are there
pre-built COFF Kernels available for Debian sarge?)
- Or is there some magic for booting from CDROM with open firmware 1.0.5?
- Anybody out there who has successfully booted Linux (even better,
Debian) on oldworld powermac via network or CDROM? Also without Macos
being installed?
- Pointers to additional sources of information welcome.
Please also reply to me personally, I'm not subscribed to the lists.
Thanks, Ralf
--
Ralf Schlatterbeck
email: ralf@zoo.priv.at FAX: +43/2243/26465/23
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