Gregory Seidman wrote:
This is sort of a long shot, but there's always the chance that someone has managed it. I just bought my wife a Mac mini. She has little use for Linux on it, but I'm always into playing with such things. For that matter, I have a dual G4 tower that I haven't bothered putting Linux on. What I'd like to do is buy an external Firewire drive and put Debian on it such that I can plug it into any Mac (well, presumably only New World), have it come up as recognized in the Mac bootloader that comes up when one holds down Option, then chain load into something (yaboot, I expect) where I can pick an appropriate kernel (G3, G4, G5, SMP, whatever). This is sort of like a liveCD (with less autodetection), actually, but much more useful.
I had to do something similar with my Powerbook Pismo for awhile, when its aging internal hard disk kicked the bucket. I hacked out a little script (I'd been thinking about it for awhile, but had to make it work then); I'm attaching it to this e-mail. You should be able to drop it into /etc/mkinitrd/scripts, and if you can chroot into the filesystem on the Firewire drive, then remove (and purge) and reinstall the kernel-image package (so that the initrd gets rebuilt), it should work.
It's not a foolproof answer, and it could be easier, but it can be made to work; I was fortunately able to make use of it, so my Powerbook was still useful while I waited for a new internal drive.
-- Derrik Pates demon@devrandom.net
Attachment:
root_settle.sh
Description: application/shellscript