installing Debian on an OldWorld PowerMac
a friend and i are trying to install debian on his old PowerBook G3
"Wall Street". having just stuck a CD into many x86s, i blithely
assumed this would be similar. But not only is his CD drive kind of
flaky, the OldWorld macs won't boot off an ISO image:
OldWorld Powermacs will not boot a Debian CD, because OldWorld
computers relied on a MacOSROM CD boot driver to be present on the
CD, and a free-software version of this driver is not available. All
OldWorld systems have floppy drives, so use the floppy drive to
launch the installer, and then point the installer to the CD for the
needed files. [1]
contrary to the assertion above, his OldWorld system does *not* have a
floppy. So, we've been trying to do it from Open Firmware, as
described in the next paragraph of that same page:
If your system doesn't boot directly from CD-ROM, you can still use
the CD-ROM to install the system. On NewWorlds, you can also use an
OpenFirmware command to boot from the CD-ROM manually. Follow the
instructions in Booting NewWorld Macs from OpenFirmware, Section
5.4.3 for booting from the hard disk, except use the path to yaboot
on the CD at the OF prompt, such as
0 > boot cd:,install\powermac\yaboot
note that this is not a NewWorld.
um .... we're lost here. we have no floppy, but we're not NewWorld,
so we can't boot off CD but we can't use OF either?
has anyone gotten Debian up and running on a WallStreet PowerBook?
any pointers?
thanks a lot!
</nori>
[1] http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/ch-rescue-boot.en.html#s-install-cd
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