Hi PowerPC people. I installed Debian (current unstable, downloading everything over http, using a CD-RW burned from cvs boot-floppies from a few days ago) recently on an Apple G4. After having some problems getting Open Firmware (as opposed to Linux or MacOS) to see the non-Apple IDE hard drive on which I wanted to install Linux, which were resolved only by physically moving hard drives around in the computer and then reinstalling Debian, I am having still other problems. The biggest one is that when I boot into Linux from my hard drive, the system hangs after the last "kernel startup" message, which relates to USB. I know it is the last message because when the same kernel starts up from the CD, using the CD as the root partition, it is the last message to show before the ramdisk is loaded and the installer starts. To verify that there really was no difference in kernel, I booted off the cd's kernel, specifying my installed root partition as the root partition to use, and the same problem occurred. I also copied the CD's kernel to the hard drive and tried that kernel there, with identical results (i.e., hang after the last message, the USB one). By the way, the problem is IMHO probably not in the USB, because when I unplug all my USB peripherals after the yaboot prompt, the kernel hangs, although I do not get any USB messages. I also tried running off of the CD then chrooting to my hard drive, but except for one fleeting and short-lived success, this always resulted in "Illegal instruction" or "Segmentation fault". Does anyone have any idea of what to do? Someone on #debianppc suggested asking in #mklinux (this is on OpenProjects), where someone suggested that maybe init wasn't being found, and they suggested running with 'quiet' to turn off extraneous messages; this turned off all output entirely! I tried running with init=/bin/sh, with no different results. I intend to try the verbose option next, to gain more insight. Are there any other kernel options or other techniques I should adopt? Thanks in advance for all your help. This machine is being very very resistant, and if I weren't honestly interested, I would have stopped long ago. Jimmy Kaplowitz jimmy@debian.org
Attachment:
pgpAEa8JJQnNE.pgp
Description: PGP signature