Installation worked! Now, the modem, though...

["Sunnanvind" <sunnanvind@fenderson.com>]

Chris: Thanks a mil for pointing me to  
people.debian.org/~/walters/debian/installer/new-powermac/ - it worked 
like a charm.
The issue was probably the kernel all along.

I now have a working single-boot debian installation and don't have to 
deal with mac-quirkiness (I was referring to Mac OS when I said "doesn't 
ship with a compiler") which is a good thing, nor mac-beautifulness, 
which is somewhat sad, but hey, I have X11-beautifulness (I love xaw).

Now I'm trying to get the internal modem to work. lsmod says 
that 'macserial' is loaded (and 'serial' isn't), but neither pppconfig 
nor wvdialconf finds a modem.
"setserial -g /dev/ttyS*" says UART: unknown for /dev/ttyS0 
and /dev/ttyS1.

I don't think I'm running devfs.

Does anyone have any clues to what I'm missing? Please let me know. 
Thanks.
Sue.