Re: Debian on IBM RS/6000 7248-43p
On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 12:01:45PM +0200, Alexander Huemer wrote:
> I am the proud owner of this ancient machine on which I am attempting to
> install Debian. This machine is equipped with a Gotek floppy emulator
> and a ZuluSCSI emulator (for HDD and CD-ROM) for convenience reasons.
> For reference, this is a 32bit PowerPC machine following the PReP[1]
> specification.
>
> [2] says:
> > Debian on 32-bit PowerPC (powerpc)
>
> > It first became an official "release architecture" with Debian
> > GNU/Linux 2.2 ("potato") and had retained that status until the
> > publication of Debian 9 ("stretch"). The last supported release for
> > 32-bit PowerPC is Debian 8 ("jessie"). See the release note and
> > installation manual for further information.
>
> Therefore I am focusing on Jessie.
> [3] is rather sparse on details regarding installation media options.
Well I have seen lots of people say woody worked on that machine.
Not sure how late support for that hardware stuck around. After all
192MB ram and 133MHz 604 is not a lot of resources. I am not sure how
late Debian would have supported installing on a machine with that little
ram, assuming you have it maxed out, which it might not be.
> Does this apply to my machine? I don't know. Where would I find the
> respective floppy image? [4] doesn't have a 'floppy' folder or something
> similar.
It should not apply to this machine as far as I can tell. Yeah no floppy
based installer for debian for a long time.
> > CD-ROM based installation is supported for most architectures.
>
> Again, I don't know if CD-ROM based installation is expected work on
> PReP. [5] doesn't contain any ISO images. I've tried [6] though that
> doesn't boot.
>From what I can find, that machine does boot from CD.
> I've tried the image contained in the .gz at [7], though that doesn't
> boot either. There are several other files at the parent directory of
> [7]. I am not sure what to do with them though.
>
> Then there is [8]. Way older Debian release, but worth a try. The link
> to floppy images doesn't work anymore, but IA has a copy, see [9].
> The image debian-7248-boot.img isn't recognized by the FlashFloppy
> firmware as being a valid floppy image, hence it doesn't boot. It's
> unclear to me what the problem with the image is, `file` recognizes it
> just fine.
>
> > $ file debian-7248-boot.img
> > debian-7248-boot.img: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0x41,
> > active, start-CHS (0x0,0,2), end-CHS (0x4f,1,18), startsector 0, 2879
> > sectors
>
> Now I don't know what else to try anymore. If anybody is reading this
> who has worked on a 43p before, I'd appreciate any pointers.
Well certainly a partition with type 0x41 is in fact what an IBM PReP
machine boots from. So that does look like a bootable harddisk image.
I have not worked with such a machine, the earliest I have used was
a power6 machine, although they are still PReP and boot from the same
partition type. Way more RAM and CPU though.
Maybe you should try woody first to see if you can get it to boot at all,
just to run something other people have said worked on it. It ought to
boot from the CD, but woody also has floppy imags if you have to resort
to that. At least you can find out if the machine boots at all.
I suspect you could netboot it using tftp/bootp as well but that shouldn't
be necesary.
--
Len Sorensen
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