Re: Bug#273986: Quasi-successful Installation - Sarge netinst rc1 on Beige G3
On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 12:11 AM, Duane Cottle wrote:
Hi Rick,
Sure does. I spent five hours reading your posts since March today.
I take that as the highest of compliments. (<-8) Thank you, sir!
It's
already saved me a lot of trouble testing this stuff. Been working with
boot floppies this evening, as you have.
I just completed a successful install from Sven's daily 2.6 disks.
There
were some really different/welcome phenomena. I'm sure you'll see
it, if
you haven't already.
Do you mean the 2.6 floppy disks? I haven't been able to get them
to work. The 2.6 "boot" floppy (the "ofonlyboot" floppy as well)
starts reading OK but ends with the screen colors inverted and
hangs. It never ejects the "boot" floppy or switches to the text
screen. Do you know how to get around this?
The 2.4 floppy set works fairly well, though there's still one
show-stopper problem. It can't seem to find my IDE disk. I'll be
submitting an install report on my experiences soon.
If you're talking about the CDs (businesscard or netinst) I agree
with you. 2.6 is very nice. A CD-based 2.6 install from BootX is,
for an experienced user, almost completely trouble-free.
That said, there are some serious "usability" issues for a novice
user (Fortunately, these issues are largely shared with the "x86"
version -- so I have confidence that they will be fixed before
release.) and the PowerPC sections of the manual need to be
completely re-written for Sarge. The current one has lots of
"Woody"-isms and and not a few "x86"-isms that need to be weeded
out and re-written for Sarge and PowerPC/Mac.
Do you know how I could test the netboot images. I'm not there yet. Do
they allow mounting a source nfs export? I've been inching my way there
because I'll eventually load up all my cluster nodes in this fashion.
I haven't tried netboot for Linux yet. (I assume you are talking
about telling Open Firmware to get its kernel and initrd via tftp
from the net, then getting the rest via NFS -- or something like
that.) I've done it for Solaris on Sparc hardware, but never for
Linux. My aversion to Apple's buggy Open Firmware implementations
is showing, I guess.
If I had to make netboot work, I think I'd try it once on an x86
box first, just to see how it's "supposed" to work for debian.
You'll probably want to get some experience with the "mkinitrd(8)"
command as well. I expect you'll have to hand-craft your own
initial ram-disk images. The current floppy and/or CD-rom initrd
images won't be much help for a netboot.
I guess I'm not much help there. You should probably ask the
various debian mailing-lists if anyone has done a netboot install
successfully and can help walk you thru the steps. You should also
check the Apple Tech-info library knowledge-base for anything on
net-booting Macs. And there's always google and his cousins, as a
last resort.
Let me know what you find out! There's probably a section to be
written for the new installation manual in the experience.
Enjoy!
Rick
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