Booting Debian on oldworld G3

[Wayne Pascoe <wayne.pascoe@ehsrealtime.com>]

Well,

It finally all works. Thanks to Chris and others who mailed me
suggestions. The only thing not working is the timeout so that it
boots automagically after x seconds, but I don't care about that right
now. 

Things to note on oldworld machines :

Always run system disk first. This may solve many of your problems. I
will be providing a dd'd image of an OS8 boot disk and a dd'd image of
a disk with SystemDisk on it in the next few days for those of us with
no bootable OS9. < Where should I put this for people to access ? >

Make sure that your Linux partition appears before any Mac partitions
in the partition map.

Make sure that all partitions that you wish to boot from are within
the first 8gig on beige G3's

If you have problems with quik, do the following :

- boot off of the install disks.

- When you get the menu, hit alt-f2 and then enter to start a shell

- mount your root filesystem (eg mount /dev/hda6 /mnt)

- edit quik.conf and make sure that it looks something like the
following :

init-message="Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC (woody)"
default=Linux
timeout=100
root=/dev/hda6
partition=6

image=/boot/vmlinux-2.2.19-pmac
        label=Linux
        read-only

The partition=6 bit in this is important. This should probably match
whatever partition you have (eg 6 for hda6, 3 for hda3)

- chroot /mnt as follows : chroot /mnt /bin/bash

- run quik

I hope that this finds its way into the archives and helps
someone. Thanks again to everyone who got me here!

-- 
Wayne Pascoe <wayne.pascoe@ehsrealtime.com>

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. - Yeats