Re: Problem installing debian on G3 beige
I had the exact same problem on this Pmac 7200/megaslow. I sent in a bug report to the right address at debian, and the
summary of the reply I got was that it appeared to be kernel bug and they forwarded the report to the appropriate place
for that. I eventually got BootX application to work, but the documentation is woefully short on how to initially boot
your system. For instance, the BootX on the CD requires that you have a minimum level of StuffIt Expander on your
system, but none of that is mentioned, not even that you need StuffIt Expander at all to handle this type of file. If
you're not already a Mac-head, you are left pretty much in the dark. I did manage to scrounge enough info from many
places around the internet to make a guess that I needed to download a newer version of StuffIt, but even then I had to
use a search engine to find what web site to go to for it. A lot more details needs to go into the debian docs for the
PPC distro when it comes to booting and video. There seems to be a whole lot of assumptions made about what the user is
knowledgeable about. Of course I am the perfect test-idiot when it comes to powerpc.
It isn't a problem with COFF v. ELF or any of that. The kernel boots, it just doesn't get the ADB keyboard
working/functional. Once you paw through 57 different doc sources, you can get BootX to work, and then go from there.
If you don't already have a MacOS partition running, you are probably in an pretty tough spot.
The CDROM drive won't boot the CD, I assumed it is because this old machine isn't capable, but I don't know. I tried a
new SCSI CDROM drive in it, it refused to even recognize the drive on boot up.
Another humorous bug is that during the install, it says "make the system bootable from the hard drive?" and of course
you say "yes", and it acts like it did something excellent, but it didn't. I think this part of the install is a noop on
PPC, is that right? Should be #ifdef'd out.
a
Manea Mirko wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to install debian on a power G3 beige.
>
> I downloaded
> ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-powerpc/2.2.19-2000-12-03/powermac/images-1.44/boot-floppy-hfs.img
>
> and
>
> ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-powerpc/2.2.19-2000-12-03/powermac/images-1.44/root.bin
>
> When I start with the boot floopy, the kernel is loaded and then I am prompt
> for ramdisk (ie root.bin, I think).
>
> The problem is that if I press enter, nothing happens! In fact the keyboard
> seems locked. Is this a known problem ? I tried to write boot image to
> many floppies, but nothing changes.. I also reset open firmware with
> command-option-R-P..
>
> Any help would be appreciated !
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mirko
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-request@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: