Re: PowerPC bootdisks for potato release.

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 10:34:14AM +1100, Brendan J Simon wrote:
> 
> Are the boot disks going to be "ready" for the upcoming relesae of
> powerpc-potato in February (it is still February isn't it ?) ?
> 
> I want to buy a PowerBook but am waiting for Debian to be officially
> released and with boot floopies to install on my PowerBook.  I really do
> not want to preinstall any other OS like Yellowdog or LinuxPPC, before I
> can install Debian.
> 
> Is Yaboot required ?  I assume this is the equivalent of lilo on a x86
> machine.
> Do I "have" to allocate a 800KB HFS partition on my hard disk ?

if you are buying a new powerbook it will be a `newworld'
archetecture, this means it has no MacOS hardware ROM, only a small
boot ROM containing a `less broken' OF then older macs had.

the thing is oldworld OF would load a bootblock (like PC's do) but it
was so horridly broken that booting anything but MacOS is a real
chore.  Newworld OF is not so broken but it won't load a bootblock,
this means either boot with MacOS (meaning you need a 100MB HFS
partition instead of 800K) or a 800K bootstrap partition to act as a
pseudo bootblock.

I prefer the latter as i have little need for macos and it will be
gone as soon as that small need goes away (testing macos stuff)

I wrote some scripts to make dealing with the bootstrap partition
almost exactly like dealing with lilo, to me its just an 800K
bootblock with its own device file in /dev/ ;-) 

> I've installed Debian-2.1 on an intel machine once.  All I needed was a
> boot disk and the base*tgz file.  Will it be exactly the same for a
> powerpc machine ?

hard to say, unfortuantely booting PPCs (not just macs) is radically
different from machine to machine. 


-- 
Ethan Benson