Bug#246770: Further info (better luck).
I've had a bit of time, so I've had another go at this. I grabbed the
installer from:
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-powerpc/rc1/images/powerpc/netboot/
(Both vmlinuz/initrd.gz from that directory [ie 2.6] and also the same
from the 2.4 subdirectory)
Still using BootX 1.2 to boot up from MacOS.
I spent some time with Google and found:
http://www.jonh.net/lppcfom-serve/cache/1043.html
and some experimentation lead to the fact that
"video=platinumfb:vmode:6,cmode:8" (ie force 640x480@67Hz and 256
colours) gave me all consoles working fine, with the 2.4 kernel. With
2.6 nothing other than the first console came up ok.
After that I had network issues.
2.4 detects the internal ethernet fine and when handed the IP address
successfully get the hostname via rDNS (I don't run DHCP on my local
lan). However once it gets to fetching the Releases file it fails to do
so.
2.6 doesn't detect the network card and when told to use the MACE driver
doesn't even manage to get the hostname via rDNS.
I shoved a via-rhine card into one of the PCI slots and 2.6
auto-detected it fine. And then failed to detect the onboard SCSI. So I
gave up and went back to 2.4, which at least had the other consoles for
debugging.
2.4 found both ethernet cards and offered me the choice, so I chose the
via-rhine. Worked fine. Got to disk selection and chose to reformat the
ext3 / from last time and it auto-reused the swap.
Base install all went fine; no kernel issues like last time.
Rebooted into base-config (still using BootX so obviously had to modify
the root device by hand), worked fine.
No further issues; all seemed to install ok.
As an experiment I booted into the installed 2.4.25 kernel and tried the
onboard ethernet and got the same issues - very slow data transfer rate,
to the point where it's unusable.
So, the kernel installation problem is fixed. The colours on the VTYs is
fixed with the right boot options. And the fstab stuff is fixed.
Which leaves only the onboard network issue really (and the SCSI stuff
under 2.6, though it works fine under 2.4). The onboard network seems to
work fine under MacOS, so I don't think it's a hardware issue.
J.
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