Hello Adrian,
What is more likely is that you have bad memory modules in your machines and Yaboot just happens to use different memory regions which is why it's not affected by the problem.
Hmmm… this computer came from my High School's IT department, so its RAM was upgraded by High Schoolers and may very well be bad. I just never thought it was because I never ran into issues on OS X or the 2019 snapshot of Debian I got installed with yaboot.
I would suggest running a memory tester to check your RAM's health or replace all modules with known good ones. Also, make sure that the machine has reasonable amounts of memory.
I believe I have 384 MB. What program should I use for this?
You can either use the last stable installation images for PowerPC:https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/7.11.0/powerpc/iso-cd/and then upgrade from Wheezy to unstable but that's not going to be easy.
Why Wheezy when Jessie is available? Is that image not stable?
Or, you can use one of the older ISO images for PowerPC which were still based on Yaboot:https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/9.0/powerpc/iso-cd/ https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/powerpc/iso-cd/ https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/ (anything before May 2019 should be Yaboot)
Yeah, I've already managed to get the April 20 2019 image running. Upgrading to the latest sid is a nightmare though; I'll have to go in small steps utilizing snapshot.debian.org if this is the case.
Reverting the installer system back to Yaboot is not an option for us since that would bring much more problems than it would solve. In particular, Yaboot is no longer maintained upstream, does not work with modern filesystems and does not allow debian-cd and debian-installer code to be shared with other architectures as can be done with GRUB.
Yeah, I've already been made well aware of this. I'm not asking for debian-installer to switch back to yaboot, many people are having success with GRUB; I was just asking for assistance in creating my own special 2022 yaboot image.
Thanks for all this useful info, -- Ben Westover
Attachment:
OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature