Install on 466 MHz G4?

["Mark K. Gardner" <mkg@lanl.gov>]

Hello all,

I have been struggling to install debian-powerpc on my new 466 MHz
Macintosh PowerPC G4. (I am using the same approach I used at work to
successfully configure a 2x450 MHz G4 to triple boot Debian, MacOS and
MacOS X.) Here are the steps I have taken which I gleaned from the
Debian install guide, Eric Benson's mac-fdisk-basics.txt, and Eric
Deveaud's comp.os.linux.powerpc:42534 post.

1) Boot MacOS install CD and partition /dev/hda into four HFS+
paritions with sizes 107653M, 3200M, 10240M, and everything else.

2) Install MacOS 9.1 on the 3200M partition.

3) Attempted install of MacOS X using UFS on the 10240M partition.
(This hangs forever, or at least 12 hours, until I reboot. I am giving
up for now. Installing on a HFS+ partition works fine, but I
anticipate a fight between MacOS and MacOS X about who has the blessed
folder so I want to install on UFS so MacOS can't see it.)

4) Boot Debian install CD and use mac-fdisk to subdivide the 107653M
partition.

  a) Delete the partition.
  b) "C"reate an 800K partition with type "Apple_Bootstrap" and name
     "bootstrap".
  c) "c"reate an 512M partition with name "swap".
  d) "c"reate an 10240M partition with name "/".

  At this point, the lower part of the partition table looks like this:

    /dev/hda9   Apple_Bootstrap  bootstrap    800K
    /dev/hda10  Apple_UNIX_SVR2  swap         512M
    /dev/hda11  Apple_UNIX_SVR2  /          10240M
    /dev/hda12  Apple_HFS+       MacOS       3200M
    /dev/hda13  Apple_HFS+       MacOS_X    10240M
    /dev/hda14  Apple_HFS+       rest       <rest>

  e) Write the table to disk. (The kernel panics so I pushed the reboot
     button on the front.)

5) Upon reboot, I checked the table which appears OK so I proceed to
install Debian.

6) When prompted to set up booting from the hard disk, I escape to a
shell and install yaboot:

  mkofboot --boot /dev/hda9 -m /usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot --root \
    /dev/hda11 --partition 11

7) Finally I reboot expecting to finish the Debian install. Instead
MacOS boots.

8) I attempted the graphical OpenFirmware boot (holding down the
option key while booting) but the Linux partition isn't an option.

9) I boot into OpenFirmware (cmd-opt-O-F) (portions of the exchange
follow):

  Apple PowerMac 3,4 4.1.8f5 Boot ROM built on 03/21/01 at 11:49:53
  .
  .
  .
  ok
  0> boot hd:9,yaboot
  .
  .
  .
  Welcome to yaboot version 0.9
  Config file read, 158 bytes
  Loading kernel...
  Image not found.... try again
  Warning ! default close called !
  boot:

At this point I have no idea what to type! Would someone please
enlighten me on what I should do? Does anyone know why installing on
my 466 MHz G4 should be so different from the 2x450 MHz G4 at work?

Mark

-- 
Mark K. Gardner
RADIANT Team, Advanced Computing (CCS-1)
Computer and Computational Sciences Division
Los Alamos National Laboratory
P.O. Box 1663, M.S. D451
Los Alamos, NM 87545
Email: mkg@lanl.gov
WWW:   http://public.lanl.gov/mkg/
Phone: 1-505-665-4953
--