Re: Successfully installed Debian 10 on Lombard G3 PowerMac
Hi Alex!
On 12/28/20 9:31 PM, Alex Perez wrote:
> 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.
Correct. GRUB is incompatible with the old version of OpenFirmware used
on these machines.
> 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.
Great to hear.
> 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.
The color problems are most likely an endianness issue. Which X.org driver
are you using? Check the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
> 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.
Yaboot was no longer maintained upstream and has had multiple build issues
and was incompatible with modern versions of ext4.
Someone has revived Yaboot upstream, however, and if I find the time to
work on it, I might go ahead and update the Debian package [1].
Help is always welcome.
Adrian
> [1] https://github.com/rsaxvc/yaboot4
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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