Installing debian on mac mini G4

[Christian Lynbech <christian@defun.dk>]

I have an old Mac Mini G4 that I would like to install debian on, but I
am having some problems getting it to work.

The internal CD drive stopped working long ago, I have an external LaCie
FW drive but I canot get the installation to work from that.

The symptom I see is that if I boot with Option down, I do get a choice
of boot devices which includes the Debian CD in the LaCie, but if I
select it and continue, the screen will go black for a couple of seconds
and then the bootdevice selection screen re-appears, as if something bad
happened during the Debian bootstrap. I have tried both with Debian 4,
5, 6 and snapshots of 7 and all behaves the same way, so it does not
seems to be an installer issue.

I have managed to install OSX Tiger from the drive so it is not that it
doesn't work. I have also earlier had an Ubuntu install running, so
there should be hope. Obviously, there can be some hardware issues
(there are some problems, if I turn wlan on, OSX will freeze in a few
minutes).

Anybody knows what is going on or has any ideas how I can debug the
problem?

I am going to look into trying to boot from a USB stick, and/or trying to
netboot but would much prefer to get the CD way to work.


------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)