Re: Problem installing debian on G3 beige
Ethan Benson wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 05:09:04PM -0800, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> the CDs are NOT bootable on any oldworld mac, with any kind of CDROM.
Yeah, I figured. Wanting to put old hardware that's been lying around unplugged for some time to a good use sometimes
requires extra work. Que sera, and all that rubbish.
> > 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.
>
> no it should not, it does work on oldworld powerpc (*not* newworld
> though, see the install docs). if you read the install docs you will
> see something like this:
>
> IMPORTANT: The Make-Linux-Bootable-Directly-From-Hard-Disk step will
> install quik, however it will not make the necessary modification to
> OpenFirmware's boot-device variable. This means that running
> Make-Linux-Bootable-Directly-From-Hard-Disk will not cause Debian
> GNU/Linux to be booted when you reboot. To make Debian GNU/Linux boot
> you need to select Execute-a-Shell and run:
>
> nvsetenv `ofpath /dev/sda2`
>
> where /dev/sda2 is your root partition. Perform this step after
> running Make-Linux-Bootable-Directly-From-Hard-Disk.
um, root partition or boot partition?
> read the installation docs
> read the installation docs
> read the installation docs
> read the installation docs
> read the installation docs
>
> it can't be said enough.
>
> yes they are not perfect but they do answer half the questions that
> are asked on this list every other day.
Perhaps it can be said too much, however. You may have missed the spot where I mentioned that I had read the install docs
backwards and forwards, and many other sources of info floating around the web just to figure out what the heck a .sit file
is. But I did also read the part where it says that the 'ofpath' command doesn't work if you booted with BootX, and that
appears to be true on my machine when I tried it. So I am not able to make use of the above instructions. It's sort of a
chicken and egg thing.
As for the idea that the installation procedure did something to install quik, but that something isn't effective until you do
something else that's documented in the installation docs, it still isn't a good reason to leave a somewhat misleading
exchange in the installation process. It could just as easily mention after it's finished installing quik that the user now
needs to consult the docs to finish the job. For a person like me, I might have taken a week to fully read the installation
docs, as a background task, and may not remember every word by the time I finally get the system to boot into Linux so I can
even do the install, so the more helpful the messages that pop up, the better, if anyone is asking me. Some of the more
complicated parts might be hard to remember at all if you have no idea what they are talking about, for instance, if you've
never heard of quik or yaboot or BootX or "OpenFirmware device paths" before. OK, so I was already familiar with OF, but you
get my drift.
I'm skeptical that it actually did install quik on my system, but I won't know until I get the following question answered:
I don't know which partition to specify as the boot partition when running ybin/quik. On the original MacOS disk, there are 5
partitions:
part1: the partition map
part2: Apple_Driver43 (or something close to that -- 32KB in size, if memory serves)
part3: Apple_Driver43 (part duex? this one is 128KB in size, if I remember right)
part4: Apple_patches (don't remember the size, but less than 1MB, I think)
part5: Apple_HFS whatever, the main partition with MacOS installed on it.
So, what does it all mean? ~:^) There is no Apple_Boot partition, I'm guessing that this is another benefit of trying to
reuse wicked obsolete hardware ~:^) I'm used to jumping through hoops to get old hardware working, now if I can just figure
out which hoop to jump through. I installed Potato on a second disk, and I left myself a 65MB partition on that disk with
type Apple_Boot, but haven't quite figured out how to switch over completely to that disk. [I am thinking of changing the
SCSI id's on the two disks so that the linux disk is ends up sda instead of sdb, and I'm hoping that the Apple ROM will be
nice enough to notice that the first disk isn't bootable but the second is, and then I can run ybin and remove the MacOS drive
w/o any problems.] Right now I'm afraid to run ybin/quik and specify any of the Apple_{Driver,patches} partitions as the boot
partition for fear that [I don't know what I'm doing and] I'll hose the MacOS disk and then I will be completely screwed.
Cheers,
a
PS. Three hoorahs for Debian Potato supporting PPC. I now have the ability to make excellent use of this machine, which was
serving as a door stop before this, and the only thing which isn't perfect is the current booting procedure, but even if I can
never remove the MacOS disk and always have to boot MacOS first, that would hardly be the end of the world, since Linux has
yet to crash on this machine. It makes a fine web applications server for very lite web apps. As long as there are no
graphics to render or quadratic equations to solve .... ~:^)
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