Re: Report on PowerPC Installation Experiences
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I know it's bad form to reply to yourself, but I wanted add to the list
of d-i on powerpc issues...
On Wed, 24 May 2006 03:12:19 -0400
Daniel Dickinson <alemc.2@bmts.com> wrote:
> Hello D-I Team,
>
> I have finally had a successful couple of installs on an 'old world'
> mac-clone and would like to report to you on my experiences. Some of
> the findings are things for which I will submit patches to the
> installation manual, and others will have to wait until I get into the
> d-i code (and scripts, and packages lists, etc).
>
> First my hardware environment:
>
> It's a StarMax 4000/160 with 96 Mib of RAM, which uses an Apple
> Tanzania motherboard, and which MacOS 9.1 System Profiler reports as a
> PowerMac 4400. I initially installed onto a 9.1 GB SCSI hard drive,
> and when I was having trouble with that, a 6.4 GB IDE drive, and once
> I achieved success retried the scsi drive.
>
> At this point I haven't successfully installed a dual boot
> environment, but I anticipate that I will be able to do so later this
> week.
>
> The first challenge was booting the installer. Last week I tried the
> miBoot-enabled boot floppies, but all that happened is that they got
> ejected. The version of miBoot that comes with BootX got further
> (kernel messages appeared, but the screen was unreadable), but because
> I couldn't read the messages I didn't pursue it beyond noting that it
> booted.
I have successfully installed with miBoot-enabled floppies from the
23rd. The 24th's still get ejected after a small amount of disk
activity.
The 23rd's floppies seem to have issues with not loading modules, even
though the udebs with the modules have been loaded (and the modules
are under /lib/modules/... I think that either the .map files, or
modules.dep doesn't contain the entire list of modules (this may be
linked to loading both the net-drivers and cd-drivers floppies and not
only one). Manual 'insmod' works (provided you can figure out which
modules depend on which others).
Also, a paperclip is necessary to eject the boot floppy in order to
load the ramdisk floppy and to switch to the cd and/or net drivers
floppy.
And something I have observed for both Beta2 and the daily builds, is
that the quik install step fails if /boot and root are not the same
partition. According to the quik documentation quik requires
that /boot and root be on the same disk, but not that they be the same
partition.
> Using BootX on a MacOS partition, on the other hand worked fine. It
> only works with the vmlinux kernels, not any of the vmlinuz-xxx
> kernels, even the vmlinuz-coff kernel. Once I had BootX, vmlinux,
> and an the installer initrd.gz in the same folder (HFS+ works fine,
> probably because the kernel and ramdisk are in memory not read from
> disk). I have had success with the mini.iso for netboot as well as a
> renamed netinst.iso (the default name of
> debian-powerpc-testing-....iso is too long for HFS, but once it's
> renamed to netinst.iso all is fine) with the cd install kernel and
> initrd.gz. The iso must be on an HFS partition (possibly a FAT
> partition will do as well, but I haven't tried that yet), not HFS+.
>
> Once I got BootX working, I went through the install process. For IDE
> the process went smoothy, with the exception that, because quik
> requires that the kernel and initrd be on ext2 but partman defaults to
> ext3, once you get to the quik install portion of the install you get
> an error message, and kicked into the menu. On each menu step, the
> quik installation is automatically retried, which means that after
> re-partitioning, before you get a chance to install the base system,
> the installer tries to redo the quik install step, which fails with an
> error message. It's a bit annoying, but goes away once you reinstall
> the base system.
>
> On reboot, quik does it's thing, but no kernel messages are displayed
> on the screen (maybe they're getting sent to OpenFirmware's
> output-device instead of the framebuffer device?), which, the first
> few times I tried installing, made me think the machine was hung.
> Wait long enough, however, and you get the login: prompt.
>
> SCSI is not so happy, unfortunately. It just sits at the penguin logo
> screen (top left corner of the screen) and does nothing. I suspect
> that this is because the necessary driver is not being included in the
> ramdisk by initramfs-tools (I had a similar problem with
> initramfs-tools on i386), so I will be trying yaird to see if it makes
> a difference.
>
> Also, for scsi, the quik-install step fails during OpenFirmware update
> step. Going to vc/2, chroot'ing into /target, and using
> 'nvsetenv boot-device "scsi-int@sd0@0"'
> followed by a manual quik install (I'll have to check the exact
> command line I used, basically I manually set the first.b, second.b,
> and config file) seems to work (although it's possible that failure
> to boot is because the manual quik install is wrong) seems works. At
> least the nvram is set as it should be and quik executes on boot (so
> the mbr is correct at least).
>
> I'll report more on the my scsi tests, as I perform them. I also
> intend to try dual boot with quik and BootX.
>
> I have also figured out that a netinst cd with bootx could be used to
> bootstrap the system, if you have a MacOS 8.1 DiskTools 2 PPC floppy
> (downloadable free of charge from apple.com) with an Apple CD-ROM
> driver instead of Disk FirstAid. It requires a non-free floppy, but I
> believe the cd would still be dfsg-free (at least BootX was included
> with woody, but I will have to double-check the license).
>
> Ideally the miBoot floppies will work (and I will be trying the latest
> versions once I finish with my scsi tests).
>
> Also, I will copy the logs to floppy before rebooting, so that I can
> submit them as well.
I haven't got scsi working yet, and have to wait for my PRAM to
discharge before I can test again (the macs I have use PS/2 or ADB
keyboards, but I only have a PS/2 keyboard, and it appears that the
PS/2 keyboard is not activated until late in the boot sequence so I am
unable to Alt-Apple-R-P). With beta2 I got as far as a penguin logo,
but with the daily floppies I'm just gettin a blank black screen on
reboot (on my scsi system).
- --
And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early,
now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or
strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore
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