installing debian/ppc

[Clay Caviness <ccaviness@yar.com>]

Since the webpages are out-of-date, I read through the mailing list
archives as best I could.

This is what I've been able to accomplish:

I'm using a Power Mac G3/266 with 192M RAM with two external SCSI drives
attached.

I installed LinuxPPC (RedHat-based) on the small external 500M drive (sdc).
Once booted into LinuxPPC using BootX 1.0.1, I partitioned set up the other
external 1G drive (sda) into three partitions, sda2 at 128M for swap, sda3
at 128M for root, and sda4 with the rest for usr. 

While booted into LinuxPPC, I mounted /dev/sda3 on /mnt and /dev/sda4 on
/mnt/usr. I downloaded base2_1.tgz from
<ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/disks-powerpc/2.0.11.4_199
8-10-15/>. I unpacked base2_1.tgz into /mnt.

I was unsure how to proceed at this point, however. I created an fstab file
in the /mnt/etc/ directory, and copied the /boot/vmlinux file from the
RedHat install to the /mnt/boot/ directory for good measure. I then
restarted and changed BootX to use /dev/sda3 as root device and let it fly.

After the kernel loaded, I got a message saying /sbin/unconfigur.sh
couldn't run because it was a read-only filesystem (not the exact error; I
can get that if needed), and I couldn't get any further than that.

Is there a better installation procedure available yet? A ramdisk image or
boot floppies? If not, how do I proceed from here? I'm very interested in
using debian again, especially after dealing with RedHat-based ports.

Thanks in advance for any help.

--
Clay Caviness            Network Manager, Y A R Communications
mailto:ccaviness@yar.com