Re: How to switch to debian on a powermac G4?
On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 06:38:09PM +0200, Christian Lynbech on satellite wrote:
> However, besides missing the nice warm feel of a debian system, YDL is
> not suitable for the software in question, since that requires glibc
> 2.0 while YDL, like most other modern linuxes, comes with glib 2.1 (or
> is 2.2, but not compatible), and my attempts at fixing that situation
> has so far failed miserably.
>
> The recommended linux is LinuxPPC-R4 (or some MkLinux variant), but I
> really want to try out Debian, but I have a hard getting the darned
> installation program going.
Requires glibc 2.0? Are you sure?
If so, you should not even be trying to make this run - glibc 2.0 never
really existed on PowerPC, it was a halfbaked port at best. Only 2.1
and soon 2.2 are really an option. R4 and MkLinux were notoriously
incompatible with everything else.
> I have the disk partitioned and set up, and the contents of
> disks-powerpc on the second partition, but since the G4 has no floppy
> disk I am a little lost on how to get the installation going.
>
> I tried burning a CD with the boot-...-hfs.img, but I cannot get the
> Mac to boot form that, if that was the intention.
No, that only works on machines with floppy drives :)
> I also tried BootX (which seems like the best option), and this also
> boots into linux with the kernel supplied, but the boot hangs after
> the recognition of the drives (hda/hdc).
As someone else added, BootX does not support G4s terribly well (I
believe it is a problem with the new MacOS ROM files).
> I am missing some kernel options in the BootX configuration? Should
> there be more files than the ramdisk image present somewhere for the
> installation program to get going?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I seem to so close, and that is
> really frustrating :-)
Well, if you have a debian mirror handy, it is not too difficult to
make a powerpc-bootable Debian install CD. The images are not
available publicly yet (don't really have a place to put them - I'm
working on that) but if you need I can probably find a way to get you
the image.
Otherwise, yaboot on a zip disk works wonders.
Dan
/--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\
| Daniel Jacobowitz |__| SCS Class of 2002 |
| Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Carnegie Mellon University |
| dan@debian.org | | dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu |
\--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
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