d-i "testing" installer kernels + Power Mac 8500
Hi,
I had a chance to test the d-i installer and wanted to provide a little
feedback. This was with the kernel and ramdisk found in:
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/new-2.4-kernels/powerpc/netboot/
I did NOT use the ones in the 2.4 sub-directory, just this directory
itself. I thought these were 2.6 kernels (if they were not in the 2.4
sub-directory ?)... Installation is to a Power Mac 8500, 1 G RAM, 2
hard drives: a 4.5 GB SCSI IBM disk, with Mac OS 9 (with BootX) and a
backup of my old debian testing installation, and a WD Raptor SATA HD,
36 G, running off a FirmTek SATA PCI card. CPU is a G3 / 375 MHz card,
but I also have a dual-CPU 604e card I want to try to use.
Everything went pretty smoothly. Having been working with linux for ~
12 years now, the original debian installer never gave me any trouble
to really complain about. However, d-i seemed to really improve on the
old installer, and things went very smoothly. I guess the part of the
installation in which I deviated from a person who might be newer to
linux was that I manually selected the disk partitions, as I wanted to
set it up with the possibility of migrating this disk to a new world
machine at some point in the future, in the never-ending upgrade cycle
;-)
quik installation DID fail. However, I have not applied the OF patches
this generation of machines seems to need, so I wasn't surprised that it
failed at this point. The only real troubling part was that after the
first reboot, where system initialization and installation is completed,
the powerpc-2.6.8-smp (forgive me if that's not the exact package name,
but it was the 2.6 PowerPC kernel, with SMP support) choked on my video
setup again (ATI Mach 64 card, connected to an LCD, booting into a text
console). It did boot the machine - I heard disk activity, and when I
rebooted using my old 2.4 kernel, fsck reported errors on / (which was
ext2, as per quik requirements).
So I booted into the new d-i installation, using my old 2.4 kernel, and
copied over my old /lib/modules/2.4.27 directory, and finished the setup.
So here's my question - is the installer kernel I used (location above)
a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel ? And if it is a 2.6, why did it work, and the boot
kernel not (for console video)? Does anyone have a 2.6 kernel .config
file for an old world machine ? I was planning on giving the non-smp
version of this kernel a try, but I had to call it a night by the time I
was able to create a working system.
Any comments, suggestions, answers are welcome. Again, I have to say I
was pretty happy and impressed with how smoothly everything went, save
for the glitches I came across. And even those, I was able to overcome
easily enough. Thanks to everyone who worked on all these components for
the tremendous effort !!
cheers
vinai
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