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Desperately need some help installing Debian 2.2 on a PowerBook G3



Okay, I'm going to try my question again, in the hopes that someone on this list has already experienced what I'm going through and can shed some light... I posted this once before, but the only response I got was from Dan (Thanks, Dan!) who said that everything seems to be right...

I'm trying to load Debian Potato on my Powerbook G3. I believe that this is a system with the Old World ROM. I also trying to use the CDs I purchased through Linux System Labs (LSL) which are advertised to be "official" disks.

I started by reformatting my 12 GB drive allocating half of it to MacOS 9 formatted HFS+, a CD sized partition formatted HFS, and the remainder to Linux with root, swap, /home, and /usr partitions (all of this was done through Apple's latest Disk Tools utility).

I then copied the entire contents of the Binaries Disk 1 CD onto the HFS partition because I can't have both the CD and a floppy drive at the same time (they are in the same bay and hot swappable).

I've been able to boot both through floppies I created from disk images found on the CD, and through BootX. Both launch me into the Linux installer where I have formatted the Linux partitions, mounted them, and mounted the HFS partition.

Then I come to my problem. I'm at the point where it's time to install the operating system kernel and modules. I'm given a choice of a number of different ways to do it. I've tried off of a mounted volume (the HFS partition) and the CD - both with exactly the same results:

I'm asked to choose the path where the Debian archive resides. I have no idea which archive it's asking for, but when I leave the default choice of /instmnt and select "OK" I get an error message stating that this path doesn't contain the directory /powermac/images-1.44/rescue.bin. So I assume that I'm looking for rescue.bin. (By the way, that file is in "dists/potato/main/disks-powerpc/2.2.16-2000-07-26/powermac/images-1.44/")

So I specify the path to that file (which I've verified under MacOS by actually going there). However, when I tell it to "Continue" in the Linux installer, the cursor jumps to the end of the line where I'm supposed to input the path. I've tried specifying the path element by element, both with and without the "/" at the end of each element, and get exactly the same results.

So what am I doing wrong?

I've been a Mac guy for 15 years, so I'm pretty sure that my Mac knowledge is up to snuff. I've installed and am currently running Debian 2.2 on an Intel box here, as well. It went on pretty painlessly (if you discount NIC problems that I eventually resolved).

There is _nothing_ in the docs about this, and nobody as mentioned anything similar in the few weeks that I've been reading this list. I can't find anything similar in the UseNet newsgroup archives, and my first attempt at asking here netted nothing. I can't be the first and only person to be attempting this.

So where do I go from here? Does anyone out there have an idea? I'd love to make this work, and after spending more than a dozen hours reading docs and trying various things, I'm starting to view this as a quest...

Thanks,

Chris
--
The plan was simple.  Unfortunately, so was Bullwinkle.



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