Re: Bug#382129: Beta3 won't boot on OldWorld PowerPC Mac
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 10:45:25PM -0700, brian wrote:
> i have been working hard on this issue this week, and asking for
> help with assistance at the debian booth at linux world.
>
> we installed kernel package for upgrading from sarge to etch but
> we could not get it to boot, although with quik it gets as far as loading
> the ram disk, whereas with bootx it only produces the one line
> "Welcome to Linux ..." as did the installer.
>
> i found a reference that this problem was reported in the lists
> as far back as march. note, although i do not have a working
Notice, that for all issues regarding the installer, i tried to forward most
of those to the debian-boot mailing lists, but they where mostly ignored
there.
Since then i think i have learned why this is, as part of the exclusion
campaign against me from the debian-installer team, most of the d-i devs have
me killfiled, so any message i forwarded to debian-boot was plentimuch
ignored.
Please send stuff there yourself directly in the future if you want it to have
any effect.
> floppy, others have used miboot which appears only to boot installer,
> and not an installed system:
>
> http://lists.ppckernel.org/pipermail/ppckernel/2006-March/000020.html
>
> (rick also reported using miboot recently with the installer == i believe at
> the bug originating the present thread)
Notice that Piotr, Aurelien gerome and Jeremie Koenig are working on freeing
miboot, which would allow to make it to main, and that Aurelien Gerome and
some of his friends apparently succeeded in puting a kernel with builtin
initrd onto a a HFS partition on the harddisk and boot from there. This would
be akin to how the prep or chrp zImage is copied to the PReP partition on IBM
hardware, after having be passed through mkvmlinuz. The plan is to, once
miboot is freed, to add support to mkvmlinuz for this way of handling things.
More info on this on the debootloaders alioth project, there is also a mailing
list regarding miboot (and emile) there.
> curiously, i am also trying to install debian on a powerbook 500 series
> (pre powerpc, but mac) (i have two, a 520 and a 540, as well as an earlier
> performa model) ---
> they have a new booter which i would try soon, called emile, it seems
> to be combining functions of miboot and quik and more. very nice ...
> --- yes my 68k macs have floppies, that work:
>
> http://emile.sourceforge.net/
>
> he's working on a cd version !!!
>
> anyway --
>
> to my understanding my pci-based open firmware ppc macs should not
> use miboot anyway, isn't that for nubus, that is pre OF/pci power macs ?
> of course whatever works, but as i already have two dead floppies i am
> not too keen on this method...
pci based oldworld macs are those with a pci interface but previous to the
ibook and blue-and-white powermac i believe, and still have the mac os rom,
while the newworld ones don't have a real rom. nubus pmacs are those
firstgeneration powermacs which still use the m68k legacy nubus architecture.
nubus pmacs are not supported in debian there is no 2.6 kernel, and very few
people reported any kind of success on them using the sarge 2.4.27 nubus
flavour.
> if anyone has booted with vmlinuz or perhaps with help from net/open bsd
> lately or just wants to try and repeat any of our experiments, i would
> be glad to hear of it, or if you simply want more details...
I think Aurelien Gerome is your man, CCing him.
> i am going to try the new initrd tool, yaird, to see if that helps.
> (i have already tried mkinitrd w/hand config, not having any luck,
> although i could try again)
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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