Re: G3 safe grub test
Hi Frank,
Frank Scheiner wrote:
What Debian version have you installed currently?
it says buster/sid in debian_version
I am running kernel 4.13.0-1-powerpc and it is quite stable, I have no
particular issues with the filesystem, ATA, wireless or X11 (that is no
"new" issues, there are of course limitations with the WiFi card, the
aging mach64 driver and such, but they aren't relevant here I suppose).
I booted a B&W G3 with GRUB from Debian Sid fine (see [1]), I only
later had problems with the FS, but I'm unsure if they were due to the
G3's bugged ATA controller or already existing FS errors. Hence I
assume it should also work for your G3 iBook.
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/10/msg00006.html
That sounds promising then. I am interested to test it to see if Adrians
work would work in the future also for my laptop. Also, yaboot is quite
limited with the booting of older kernels, while I hope grub is more
flexible.
Do you have another G3 or better a fast G4 machine? Then you can
install Debian Jessie on it and upgrade to Sid and then build a GRUB
image (see [2] for a manual installation where you have full control
of all steps; make sure to remove the `serial_ieee1275/scca` parts,
these were used to make use of the Xserve G4's serial console; also
adapt the settings in the GRUB configs, as your root FS containing
`/boot` is on a different partition than during my case: "apple3" =>
"apple4" and "/dev/sda3" => /dev/sda4" I assume) and copy it over to
the HFS partition (NewWorld boot partition) on your G3 iBook - you can
simply mount it and then use `cp`. You can boot the GRUB image from OF
with `boot hd:2,grub.img`.
No, I only have this laptop as a working PPC machine currently.
The described method doesn't change anything for yaboot, it should
still boot automatically afterwards.
During my tests, the produced GRUB image fitted on a small 800 KB HFS
partition together with yaboot only just, so should also work for your
case (with 1 MB HFS part.) without resizing.
This sounds promising too, that I do not need to resize partitions.
Do you think I may just install it perhaps?
I suppose the most dangerous way would be to "remove" yaboot and install
grub for OF. If it works I could risk it, but a "fix" may need to boot
from a CD, chroot and do other tricks, right? I think to remember that
booting from USB is not supported on my iBook.
Riccardo
PS: in case, could be partitions be live-resized without formatting?
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