At 21:33 -0400 9/6/00, John R. MacPhail wrote:
Have you tried BootX? Try pointing BootX at ramdisk.image.gz (as a RAM disk image, no decompression needed). If that runs, then you are rolling.
That will work, as long as I have a MacOS partition (which I do). Actually I have a whole darned Linuxppc2000 installation on the computer. Now I'm trying to learn about and compare Debian. I like the Debian thinking. My question was partly theoretical; I'd like to know how I could install the Debian system on a hypothetical client's PowerMac computer using only a floppy drive. I already know that I can do such an install from the Linuxppc2000 CD-ROM. Installing the Debian distrib onto a PowerMac from floppy only is impossible because I find no tool for making a floppy on MacOS from the Debian binary floppy image.
So far the right way to install onto a PowerMac (e.g. 7600 or PowerCenter etc.) appears to be to allocate a partition to MacOS, put bootx on it and the ramdisk compressed image, and boot into the Debian installer. I haven't done that yet and my next task is to discover what tools are available in that ramdisk kernel for completing the installation.
-- Garry Roseman <mailto:memphis@macconnect.com>