installing debian on a IBM B50 (chrp)

[Borut Mrak <borut.mrak@ijs.si>]

Hello!

I unsuccesfully tried to install Debian on a such machine for the last couple
of hours.

The only kernel that booted on that machine is some heavily modified 2.2.14
from Suse 6.4. Which (the distro) also installs like a charm.

The kernel from the current boot-floppies (current = what's in woody) would
load, the last message that was printed was something about reading the
OpenFirmware tree...

I also tried the kernel from
ftp.linuxppc.org/linuxppc-haloween/software/kernel-chrp-2.2.18-4h.ppc.rpm

There is no way I could find to use any of the kernels to use root.bin
from Debian so I could install it.

Is boot floppy:,zimage load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=8192 prompt_ramdisk=1 debug
ok?

It certainly didn't work for me here.

I also tried netbooting the machine, but I don't know what to feed it.
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/doc/netboot.html has information about
netbooting Apple hardware, but an IBM machine doesn't like beeing fed
yaboot ;-]

I have Suse installed now. Can I simply cd / ; tar -xzvf base2_2.tgz and
run something to configure it? That would be the easiest way out of this
mess for me...not a perfect one though.

thanks for reading my moaning and brainstorming and any ideas anyone might
give me. I had to deal with an AIX that was left behind by the previous
admin...don't want to deal with that anymore.

bye,

-- 
Borut
borut.mrak@ijs.si
-----------------
Conserve energy -- make love more slowly.