On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 01:14:59PM -0400, Scott MacCallum wrote: > Greetings, > > I am trying to get the latest stable release of Debian PPC installed > on an old world Mac. I have been following the Debian GNU/Linux > Installation Guide > (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/index.html.en) and in > it there is mention of a boot-floppy-hfs.img file > (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/ch05s01.html.en#id2536590) > which is the first of many boot floppies that need to be dd'ed. The > problem is I have been unable to locate the file > (http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-powerpc/current//images/powerpc/floppy/) > in question and the other ones have proven not to work. > > Could someone point me in the right direction? Disclaimer: I haven't installed to oldworld macs since 2006 so my knowledge in this area may well be outdated. The installation floppies (miboot) use non-free software and is not included in the official debian distribution. However, in ealier versions of debian, the miboot floppies were included. I don't know exactly when (was it after woody?), but the non-free part of the floppies where removed the official distro and the boot-floppies could not boot. Nevertheless, individual debian developers (Sven Luther and others) contiued to made automatically built installation floppy images available to the general public. Some of the miboot history is in recorded in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=382129 As far as I recall, there where problems to get kernels later than 2.6.15 to boot (and the the correct root device) on oldworld. And the daily miboot builds were non automatically tested, so the often failed (e.g. the image for the root-floppy was too big to fit a physical floppy disk). When I tested new kernel versions on oldworld macs with the quik boot-loader, I had to rescue or even reinstall from floppies. I learned to like the woody installation floppies, the worked well on the hardware I had (Performa 5400). After installing woody I could upgrade to sarge without problems, but be careful with kernel versions newer than 2.6.15! (I had success running self-compiled kernels newer than 2.6.15 but only with kernels that did not use an initrd!). I would try the woody boot-floppies. http://archive.debian.org/dists/Debian-3.0/main/disks-powerpc/3.0.23-2002-05-21/powermac/images-1.44/ Install woody -> upgrade to sarge -> compile a custom kernel that does not use an initrd using recent kernel sources -> upgrade to etch. But, as I said in the beginning, my knowledge may well be outdated. Perhaps others on this list have more recent experiences of installing (and running) oldworld macs. -- Hans Ekbrand (http://sociologi.cjb.net) <hans@sociologi.cjb.net> A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion Q. Why is top posting bad?
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