Re: Miscelaneous Debian Questions: PowerMac
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 12:31:35PM -0400, De Served wrote:
> Is it possible to netboot an old world PowerMac? I have a beige G3 that
> is waiting for a Debian install. I want to experiment with running this
> machine diskless. This, obviously, means netbooting the machine. Is it
> possible?
Yes, it should be possible. It's just not very common these days.
> I have spent several hours on Google looking for the answer to this
> question. The Debian installation documentation says that yaboot is
> required for a netboot, and that yaboot only works with new world Macs.
> So the official Debian documentation says nay to netbooting old world
> powermacs.
It's not exactly the same, but NetBSD has some good documentation.
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/intro.macppc.html
Some of the details are a little different, but the setup of the
hardware and server will be the same. The main difference is just
what you use as the boot file. There is a utility in the Linux
kernel tree to package a kernel and initrd into an XCOFF file for
direct use by an older OF version. I presume it still works for
building a netboot image, but I haven't tried it myself.
Just remember that Debian doesn't officially support this or
build the XCOFF image for you, but if you're willing to do a
little work on your own it should be fine.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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