PB G4 Installation
Hello,
I installed Debian SID from the 4/19/2020 installation CD to a PowerBook
G4, 1.5 GHz, 1.25 GB memory. It seems to have installed well -- thanks
to everyone who is working to maintain Debian for PowerPC!
This system has valid installations of Mac OS X Tiger and Mac OS X
Leopard. During installation, these operating systems were detected:
Mac OS X (32-bit) (on /dev/sda3) <-- This should be Mac OS X Tiger
Mac OS X (64-bit) (on /dev/sda3)
Mac OS X (32-bit) (on /dev/sda4) <-- This should be Mac OS X Leopard
Mac OS X (64-bit) (on /dev/sda4)
After installation, if I select either the first or third choice, I see:
error: can't find command `xnu_kernel'.
error: can't find command `xnu_mkext'.
Press any key to continue...
I'm not sure why the second and fourth choices exist at all on this system.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix the GRUB configuration to
allow booting of Mac OS X partitions? I'll study the man pages, but if
I can't get it to work, I'll need to install yaboot instead.
And I have these additional comments and suggestions (some of these may
be out of scope of the Debian PPC unsupported port):
1) I know Debian has opted to use systemd instead of sysvinit; however,
there are valid reasons (mostly resource related) to opt for sysvinit on
some systems. For example, on a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, 266 MHz, 384
MB memory, sysvinit runs better than systemd. This is not an invitation
to re-open (or start a new) systemd discussion, it is a request to allow
installation of packages that shouldn't require systemd, such as
synaptic, to be installed without also installing systemd. Fortunately,
Xfce can still be installed without systemd.
2) Is there a way to change the Ethernet interface from "enP2p32s15f0"
back to "eth0"? I'm sure there are many very good reasons to have the
longer names on modern systems, but on the PB G4 I'm not likely to
change out the Ethernet interface, and it would be easier to manage it
as "eth0". Again, I'm not inviting discussion about why the choice of
the longer names is better, I'm just trying to determine whether there
is a user-configurable option for switching it back to "eth0" (as it was
in Debian 7.8).
3) The trackpad on the PB G4 is a little slow and unpredictable in
Debian SID, especially when the system is doing other things (like an
apt-get update or apt-get upgrade). The problems go away if I use a USB
mouse, but I'm wondering if there is any way to tune the trackpad
performance (or if not to just disable it altogether).
thanks!
-Stan Johnson
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