Successfully installed Debian 10 on Lombard G3 PowerMac
Hi folks,
I just wanted to share that I was able to succesfully boot and install
Debian 10 using the "official" Debian 10 netinst CD from [1], with the
exception of the bootloader, which failed, and I had to handle manually.
I also tried booting from the latest snapshot CD image [2], which
completely fails to boot, I assume due to the lack of yaboot on the
latest image, which is unfortunate, as this appears to be the only way
to boot Lombard-based systems, due to the version of OpenFirmware.
Despite the hardware being 23 years old, it's usable with Debian 10, and
the on-board 100 megabit Ethernet worked fine, out of the box. I'm
booting from a 32GB SanDisk Ultra CompactFlash card, installed in the
2.5" drive bay.
Subsequent to the install, I did an update to unstable, and am running
kernel 5.9 without issues. Even Xorg starts, and works (ATI Rage LT),
albeit with a bit of "wrong color" pixels here and there. I'm not sure
why, but it's tolerable as-is.
So, I'm wondering what the rationale for removal of yaboot was, given
that it excludes a class of machines that were produced in large
quantities, where Debian otherwise works fine, except for GRUB/yaboot
support.
[1]
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/powerpc/iso-cd/debian-10.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso
[2]
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2020-12-03/debian-10.0.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso
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