HI Chris,
I am trying to do a similar project of loading Debian Sarge on to a Mac 6500 old world powerpc using BootX. Your serious of discussions has been most supportive. I have encountered the same problems, but have not yet solved them all.
I first tried and succeeded in using BootX to load Yellow Dog Linux 3.1 which worlds OK on this older mac but is slow because I only have 64 Mb of ram. But I got the idea of how to use BootX. Once I realized that the Debian initrd.gz was to be stored in the mac partition (OS 9.1) as ramdisk.image.gz then I was able to start the Sarge installation from the CDs. I learned the renaming technique from the Ubuntu lists but saw it repeated in your series of discussions.
Like you I could not reboot into Sarge once the first part of the installation had completed. I was able to use the YDL vmlinux kernal to reboot and finish the Sarge setup. So for a while I had a fully functional Sarge system running. But then I turned off the computer. It rebooted into Mac OS 9.1 and I open BootX to start Sarge. The YDL kernel no longer worked but produced a kernal panic.
So I was happy to see that you worked out a sytem to actually copy back to the mac a working reboot kernel. I'm having trouble following your example. The line # chroot /mnt is followed by an error that there is no such directory. But I can see it listed in the root director after # mkdir /mnt, # ls commands.
Also # modprobe hfs doesn't work it also errors.
I've probably missed a step. Have you been able to put together a list of steps that you followed to install Sarge? I am wondering if I have mucked up my previous installation by going back in a second time to try the steps to mount the hfs partition. Is there a way to check that? Any reference that includes hfs seems to come back as no such directory.
Bye for now,
George
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