Re: Debian Installer beta2 working on an OldWorld PowerMac-6500/225
On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 02:15:20AM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote:
> Hardware:
>
> PowerMac 6500/225 with 128MB of RAM and a 6GB SCSI disk
> partitioned as 2.5GB for MacOS, 3.0 GB for Linux root (an
> "all-in-one" filesystem) and 500 MB for Linux swap. It also has a
> SCSI CD-RW drive and a floppy drive.
>
> Software: MacOS 9.1 with Roxio "Toast" for the CD-RW drive.
>
>
>
> Following the call for testers in Debian Weekly News - January
> 20th, 2004, I decided to give it a try.
>
> The Beta2 d-i for PowerPC doesn't support OldWorld PowerMacs, but
> armed with my trusty copy of BootX, I figured I could do anything
> yaboot could do. Amazingly, I succeeded in getting it to boot and
> run the installer! (Some problems remain, but I'm sure they can
> be solved...)
Cool.
> Here's what I did.
>
> I downloaded a recent 40 MB install CD image from
> http://people.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/powerpc/beta2/sarge-powerpc-businesscard.iso
> and burned it to a CD.
>
> I copied the "root.bin" initial ramdisk file from the CD's
> /install/powermac directory into my MacOS System Folder.
> I did the same for the "vmlinux" file, putting it in the "Linux
> Kernels" folder in the System Folder.
>
> I activated BootX and told it to boot the new kernel and use the
> new initial ramdisk. After some experimentation (in which I
> discovered a lot of option combinations that *didn't* work!) I
> gave it the kernel argument "devfs=mount", and left all options
> for video modes *un*set.
>
> It booted Linux and gave me a 640x480 console running the d-i
> beta2 installer.
>
> I answered the questions it asked about locale and keyboard type,
> and it started installing.
>
> It asked for a hostname and tried to do some DHCP magic to figure
> out what my network looked like. I said to myself, "this is not
> going to work." because my very minimal DHCP server is setup to
> help my laser printer configure itself, and nothing else. All
> other machines have static network configurations. But it does
> seems to have worked at least partially, because it was able to
> retrieve and install a bunch of software.
>
> I'm currently stuck almost at the end of the install, because it
> insists on trying to install yaboot. This is impossible on an
> OldWorld Mac. I may have to do a loopback mount of the ISO so I
> can do a little surgery on the install scripts to allow me to
> gracefully bail out of the yaboot install when I burn the next CD.
This will be solved in the next d-i uploads.
I have uploaded yesterday a nobootloader package, which enable you to
work without any bootloader, but ultimately, a quik-installer would be
needed. Maybe Jeremie is already working on that ?
Also, this means that it is possible to boot with bootx on oldworld, and
that the default -powerpc-small that was selected in kernel-installer
is probably not the right solution. A "kernel to use" kind of question
might be welcome, and maybe there could also be some kind of
auto-probing for which kernel was booted.
BTW, these kind of things have more their place on the debian-boot
mailing list, so i forward this there.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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