On 14/1/2000 David Grant Cheney wrote:
1. No floppy drive. Connectivity is no problem (ethernet/external scsi/cdrom) but not having a CD or another linux system to make an image has made things difficult. Though most of the difficulties I have had could have been avoided if it weren't for: 2. cfdisk, the fdisk used by the debian installer, refuses to edit my partition table, complaining of an invalid flag. I managed to trick the installer into formating an ext2fs partition after using pdisk from macOS. unfourtunately this means: 3. No swap =+(.
this is a bug, cfdisk only knows about intel BIOS partition tables, not the mac versions, to work around this (assuming your using version 2.2.4 of the boot floppies) go to VC 2 (command F2) and run mac-fdisk this will let you edit/create mac partition tables.
however, despairing yet not wanting to give in to the urge of going over to the red-hat-esque LinuxPPC (who's script architecture I find annoying), I have persisted with the debian installer.
stick with Debian!!
I wonder if anyone out there has tried installing the powerpc debian and if anyone has had the fdisk problems I have had. fdisk works from the installer's shell, but does not read the partition table correctly. The installer's own "display partitions" menu item does display the partitions correctly though. I find this strange.
try 2.2.4 of the bootfloppies and use mac-fdisk, i am not sure if the 2.2.4 floppies are in the main ftp archive yet or not, I was able to test a private copy which worked very well.
Ethan