On Sun, Dec 31, 2000 at 07:48:50PM -0600, Garry Roseman wrote:I bought the new official Potato CD set, 2.2r2, and tried installing Debian ppc on my PowerMac clone, a PowerComputing PowerWave 150 (it's an Old World PCI Mac, like a 7600). First, the CD is not bootable on that computer or on my PowerMac> 7600. ..... As someone explained, you need Toast or another program with a license to the Apple CD drivers to create bootable cds. It's also quite tricky to set up the system folder to do it; it requires messing with miBoot, and I don't recommend it.
Actually, that's something I could do! But the clue offered by Cole Stewart is what got my installation going. I copied the kernel and the ramdisk image from the CD into the Linux Kernels folder of the HFS partition with MacOS and let BootX put me into the installer. [I hadn't realized that the ramdisk image ran the dbootstrap installer. I didn't know what the ramdisk image was for <doh>. It doesn't point out this possibility of using BootX with ramdisk.image in the installation manual, although I suppose it's obvious after Sufficient Pondering.]
To give an idea of what us newbies go through trying to install Debian powerpc -- I have three SCSI drives on the target machine with a total of 14 partitions (set up to get good performance and allow sharing of some directories via NFS). I stepped through the partitioning, meticulously defining the starting block and length of each partition FOUR TIMES! The first three times I couldn't get the installer to agree that I had defined any swap partitions. I had used fdisk's C command (not the c command) and had described the partition type as "swap", "Swap", and "Linux swap". Finally on a hunch I named all swap partitions "swap" instead of "swap1" and "swap2" as I had been doing. Bingo! That wins! But who would know that the swap partition is detected by its name and not by its type?
> Second, the install floppies can't be used for installing. The firstimage, the boot floppy, which I created on my functioning Debian Linux box using dd, does boot the PowerComputing machine and then asks for the root disk. When I insert the root disk and hit return> nothing happens. Well, now, I'm confused. You're not the first person to report this; it's as iff something is completely hosed with that kernel. I tried it on a G4 (dual tower), and the USB support worked just fine. If anyone could shed light on this I'd be quite greatful.
I can't shed any further light except to note that using BootX with the kernel from the CD, not the kernel in the floppy image, along with the ramdisk.image, worked fine.
Thanks guys. It turned out to be a successful New Year Day. -- Garry Roseman <mailto:memphis@macconnect.com>