Re: howto install debian on Pegasos?

[Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 09:37:38AM +0200, Boehn, Gunnar von wrote:
> 
> Hello Everybody,
> 
> Has anybody installed debian on a Pegasos computer already?

There is a howto at : 

http://powernico.free.fr/linux/linux_install.html

altough it dates from some time, and some things may have been done
differently. In particular, the author did not know about amiga-fdisk.

Also, Mark Olsen (bigfoot) from genisi seems to have done some further
work on the woody ppc installer, but it (naturally) is not part of the
official woody CDs, since he don't has a time machine. More to this below.

> Could you please tell me what the simplest way is to install debian?

The way i did this, is to copy the woody ppc root disk on a partition of
my harddisk, and boot into it from OF since i had no floppy disk nor
CDrom driver. Other possibilities would be to do a netboot from
somewhere else, but i did not try it.

> My Pegasos is still empty, no MorphOS or other OS installed.
> Do the 'normal' debian installers work or are they targeted for MACs? 

No and no. The normal debian installer (at least the stock woody one)
will not work out of the box on pegasos. But they are also not targeted
only at macs, and should work without problem on a wide range of ppc
hardware, including the poowerup amigas.

The main problem is that :

  1) There may not be the necessary stuff on the CD to boot from it from
  pegasos. Don't know how the pegasos CD autoboot works though, but even
  on amiga (m68k and ppc) i don't think you could boot on these CDs. You
  should be able to boot from them with some OF magic tough.

  2) The root disk knows nothing about the pegasos, so it will not
  recognize it, which may not be a problem per se, but cause the
  following problems.

  3) The root disk will not know that the fdisk needed is amiga-fdisk.
  => you can solve this by going to the second VT (Alt+F2) and launching
  amiga-fdisk (or maybe afdisk) by hand and formating there, after you
  only need to possibly reboot and bypass the formating phase.

  4) There may be other minor problems, like choice of keyboards,
  altough these may be less of a problem in the pegasos case than in the
  amiga case.

  5) The root disk will not know how to make the pegasos auto boot into
  debian. There should be some OF magic to do that, but there is not yet
  a boot loader, like yaboot for example.

And naturally, you would need a pegasos friendly kernel, so you should
also bypass all the kernel installation questions and use a custom
kernel. Not really problematic, but you would have to set the modules by
yourself (in /etc/modules).

I hear that Mark has worked on some of these problems, but i don't know
if the result of this is available. The pegasos kernel is also an a bit
archaic 2.4.18 kernel + pop patches + pegasos patches. You can either go
at :

http://penguinppc.org/dev/pop/

But you would still need the pegasos patches. Genisis has put up a CVS
repository with this kernel too, but you would have to aks them about
getting access to it, i don't remember the cvs access details.

I have built a kernel on voltaire, i could send you this, if you need.

Friendly,

Sven Luther