need a little help installing

[Otto <otto@poellath.org>]

hi,

I'm trying to install potato on my pismo. I have MacOS 9.04, MacOS X PB and
LinuxPPC running, so I figured I could convert a spare HFS partition to ext2
and have debian and LinuxPPC share the existing swap partition.

So I booted into the installer from CD, but for some reason, debian won't
let me use the existing swap partition. whenever I choose "initialize and
activate swap partition" or "activate previously installed swap partition",
the installer complains "no swap partitions that had not already been
mounted were detected".

I decided to select "do without a swap partition" and fix that later.

then I tried to set up that spare partition to install on, so I chose
"partition disk" from the menu and used that command line tool to delete my
spare HFS partition and create a new one of type ext2 in its place. seemed
to work fine, too, but still, "Initialize linux partition" gives me the same
error as above.

under "show partition map", everything looks ok, though my new partition is
said to be "not available" (just like those LinuxPPC partitions).

just out of couriosity, I opened a shell, and the welcome message said that
disks would be mounted under /target. well, not in my case. ls /target
showed that /target is empty. !?

after installing LinuxPPC few months ago, I really thought I could handle to
install debian on my own.. oh well.

any help is greatly appreciated..

TIA,
-otto.

>> I used ybin/yaboot to set up my boot configuration (works great). right now,
>> I have the following partitions:
>> 
>> 1 HFS  bootstrap
>> 1 HFS+ MacOS 9.04
>> 1 HFS+ MacOS X
>> 1 ext2 LinuxPPC
>> 1 swap
>> 1 HFS  shared data
>> 
>> for debian, I would like to convert the shared data partition to ext2 and
>> use my swap partition for both debian and LinuxPPC.
>> that way, I would only have to add an entry for debian in my yaboot conf -
>> right?
>
> Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net> wrote:
>
> yes, something like this:
> 
> image=/vmlinux
> label=debian
> root=/dev/hda7
> read-only
> partition=7
> 
> this assumes that the debian partition is /dev/hda7, that partiton=
> line must point at the debian root partition, you linuxppc images must have
> a partition line pointing at the linuxppc root partition.
> 
> note that you *must* change the partition type of that HFS exchange if
> you choose to use it for debian instead of as a HFS exchange.
> otherwise MacOS will try and mount it as HFS, see there is no HFS
> filesystem and helpfully offer to erase it.