Am 2017-04-14 um 10:25 schrieb John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
I used manual partitioning. This is the last Power Mac that is limited to LBA-28. I used a 250 GB IDE HDD, so I am above this limit. I am not sure if the automated partitioning will work around this?This probably applies to OpenFirmware only while the kernel uses its own code to access block devices, so I think it shouldn't matter. I have used large disks on my Amiga with Linux without any problems as well even though AmigaOS natively supports up to 2 GiB only if I remember correctly.
Yes, I know. The limiting factor is the boot partition(s), i.e. the one for yaboot (NewWorld bootblock) and the one with the kernel(s) and initrd(s) on it.
Most Linux installations use a separate boot partition, so in most cases the LBA-28 limit (128 GB) is not a real problem. Having an alternate OS in front (like Mac OS X) might be a problem though, since the /boot partition will then likely be past the first 128 GB. Also, at least in theory (does anyone do this?), one could use one big root partition containing /boot as a subdirectory. In such a case the kernels and initrds might become inaccessibale for yaboot/grub once the partition is filled past 128 GB (where files are physically stored on a file system is beyond manual control).
You will have to add unstable to your /etc/apt/sources.list manually. It's most likely related to "choose-mirror" not supporting unstable.
I will try that next.
One suggestion for further improvement: on an older installation I had used before powerpc was dropped (Debian 7.x, then testing) I was able to get grub2 running. It would be an idea to have grub2 as an alternative to yaboot during installation.It's possible to add support for that. We're planning to do the same thing for sparc64 but the patches for sparc64 support haven't been merged in GRUB yet, neither in Debian nor upstream. But it will come. Does anyone know how well supported GRUB on powerpc is? Does it support all PPC Macs or only newer ones, e
To my understanding only NewWorld Macs are supported. But then, *all* NewWorld Macs are, and those are "old" too by now. This should include all Macs which are called "Power Mac" (before it was "Power Macintosh"). And AFAIK the last "Power Macintosh G3" was one of the first NewWorld Macs.
I used GRUB2 successfully on my Quicksilver G4 and I was very happy with it, but I had it loaded out of the yaboot CHRP script which included the Open Firmware Penguin icon (what you see when you hold the Option during Open Firmware initialization, giving you the boot options screen). I don't think that GRUB2 includes such a script (and icon) yet. Also, using grub-install on ieee1275 will want to install the GRUB binary to /System/Library/CoreServices/...something..., presumably on a Mac OS X volume. I think this default behaviour is not wanted on a Linux-only installation. I had to manually copy the core.elf file to the NewWorld bootblock.
Cheers!