Booting PPC/Nubus
Hi -
I'm in the somewhat frustrating situation of having to install Debian on a
Powerbook 1400cs, which is a Nubus machine (and therefore not yet
supported by Debian). To make things worse, it does not have a cdrom drive,
just a serial connection to a Debian-PPC oldworld G3.
I have found that there is a project going on to make monolithic Linux work with
Nubus machines (nubus-pmac.sourceforge.net), and their patches already support
the type of machine I'm using (without pcmcia and floppy though).
At the same time, I found several floppy images on my Debian CD set, and tested
them: the image named boot-floppy-hfs.img boots successfully on the desktop G3
but crashes the notebook, as expected.
What I would like to do is help out with the Debian-boot/powerpc project here to
have a floppy that boots the kernel from nubus-pmac and starts the Debian
install process. The problem is that I'm a bit lost: For example, I tried to
find out which Debian package contains boot-floppy-hfs.img. The package
searcher on debian.org gave no answer but I finally stumbled about boot-floppies
and grabbed the package using apt-get source. Now I still have no idea where
exactly boot-floppy-hfs.img came from as the compile aborted:
make[1]: Entering directory
`/home/crashcut/my.cvs/cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies'sudo ./rootdisk.sh ""
/archive/debian/download 3700 2.3 "apus" C ""
Password:
I: ld.so on this architecture is ld.so.1
I: single locale mode (USE_LANGUAGE_CHOOSER = false)
I: downloading required packages from files
/home/crashcut/my.cvs/cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/scripts/rootdisk/EXTRACT_LIST_all
/home/crashcut/my.cvs/cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/scripts/rootdisk/EXTRACT_LIST_powerpc_apus
E: Couldn't find package debootstrap
can't find package 'ash'
can't find package 'base-passwd'
can't find package 'busybox'
can't find package 'debootstrap'
can't find package 'e2fsprogs'
can't find package 'libnewt0'
can't find package 'libpopt0'
can't find package 'makedev'
can't find package 'modutils'
can't find package 'nano-tiny'
can't find package 'netbase'
can't find package 'net-tools'
can't find package 'pump'
can't find package 'slang1'
can't find package 'whiptail'
can't find package 'amiga-fdisk-bf'
can't find package 'util-linux'
can't find package 'powerpc-utils'
can't find package 'eject'
E: ./rootdisk.sh abort
make[1]: *** [rootapus.bin] Error 255
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/crashcut/my.cvs/cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies'
make: *** [build] Error 2
crashcut@saigon (~/my.cvs/cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies)>
Could someone explain what is going on, and how I can create boot-floppy-hfs.img?
I can set aside a few hours daily to work on it; I have skills in C programming
but never done anything close to the kernel. A hint would be highly appreciated,
as well as a pointer to 'holy books' that I might need.
Thanks,
Fritz
Reply to: