Newbie needs help: apt configuration problem installing woody on PM9600 (long)
I could use some help here. This is only my second install of debian, and the first on a ppc machine. The last was an m68k Macintosh that
went fine. However on my Power Mac, I am getting crashes during the configuration of some newly installed packages. I have gotten the
following errors during the dozen or so times I have tried the configuration after install.
<#1, kernal panic>
unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address aa12d411 (error 40000000)
<followed by usual traceback information>
<#2, kernel panic>
unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 15015805 (error 42000000)
<followed by usual traceback information>
<#3, crash>
kmem_alloc: Bad slab magic (corrupt) (name=buffer_head)
<this one is usually repeated several times on successive lines>
Here are the details of what I am doing:
I am trying to install woody on a Power Macintosh 9600 / 200MP. I have 384Mb of RAM, and I have a 4.3Gb hard drive dedicated to the
debian installation. The debian drive is the only device on SCSI bus 1. I also have a 18Gb HFS+ drive and a 320Mb HFS drive as well as a
CD-ROM and a CD-R on SCSI bus 0. I have been running MacOs 9.1 on this machine for some time without difficulty. Otherwise I would
swear I have a hardware problem.
I booted the installer using bootx, the kernel and ramdisk image downloaded from:
/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/3.0.23-2002-05-21/powermac
I have partitioned the drive for debian (using dbootstrap partition option) with a 500Mb root partition, a 256Mb swap partition, and the
remainder is a usr partition. The partition and install of the base system go fine, as long as I do not allow the installer to do a bad block
check on the drive. I have gone through this several times, and any time I allow the installer to check for bad blocks, it crashes the
machine.
In trying to ascertain why that was happening, I swapped in a different 4.0Gb drive, and also tried swapping to the other SCSI bus. The
results are always the same. So I gave up on running the bad block check, and just went ahead with the installation. The install of the
base system went fine. I booted into the base system (still using bootx), and started though the base system configuration. I went
through the configuration, and chose to use tasksel to add packages. I selected only a few tasks to all, such as C / C++ devl, python
devl, etc. I did not use dselect.
On some occasions, the system would crash during the download of packages from debian ftp. On other occasions the crash would occur
after the download was completed, and during the configuration of new packages. In no case have I been able to complete the installation
of any useful packages. I did try running tasksel, and not selecting anything. On that occasion, the configuration completed, but still listed
some errors. One or more packages did not cleanly install. I attempted to use dselect to re-install the damaged packages, but things kept
getting worse until I experienced another crash.
After each failed install, I have re-initialized the hard drive. I have also tried a couple different partitioning schemes, but the result is usually
the same. First off, am I doing something wrong? Second is it possible I have a hardware problem that is not affecting MacOs, but is
making Linux unhappy?
Any help would be appreciated.
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