Using Wintel to get PowerPC code
I have been trying to - and I think suceeding in - installing the
potato distribution on my PowerMac at home. I am downloading the
software onto zip disks and then taking it home. I managed to do the
base install by copying the software to my Mac Hard Drive. I seemed to
have the basic command line interface come up and I'm not having any
problems, except for some pieces I thought would get installed
didn't. (i.e. the man command and the man pages for the utilities I
already their that I need to finish the install.)
I can't load the IBM formatted zip disks. I have tried
mount /dev/sda4 /zip
moutn -t dos /dev/sda4 /zip
The first tells me that the file system is not recognized, the second
tells me it is not supported by the Kernel. I assume either I
downloaded an old kernel, the wrong kernel, or I need to compile a new
kernel in order to get something that works.
When I go to where I have a PC running I can't even use the web pages
that would let me know about the dependencies for downloading because
they detect that I'm on a PC and point me to the i386
archive. (Perhaps I'm giving them too much credit and the
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages web site).
My best guess is to make a slow ppp connection on my Mac and use that
to generate the package list and then retrieve that and download the
actually packages on my PC. [I am pretty confident I can figure this
much out.] But I believe I will then be stuck with the problem of
having to figure out how to piecemeal copy the files over to the Mac,
at least until I can copy enough so I can rebuild and replace the
kernel with one that will read the zips. I only have about 50M of space,
because I decided to use most of my disk space for debian, on
the Mac at the moment, so my life would be a lot easier if I could
just read the PC format zips.
If the Potato gets onto a CD I can buy from Cheap Bytes or LinuxMall
before I figure this out, I hope someone tells me.
--
Josh Kuperman
josh@saratoga.lib.ny.us
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