On Sat, May 22, 2004 at 07:38:09AM +1000, James Buchanan wrote: > Please excuse my ignorance, but someone said to me "nobody ever runs > anything but the MacOS on a Macintosh." If this is so, then what > machines do the PowerPC Debian distributions run on?
Macintoshes. I'm typing this on one right now. :-) And a number of other systems too, such as a number of IBM boxes. While there are occasionally a few problems with very new Mac hardware - my laptop's built-in wireless probably won't be supported in the near to medium future, for instance, so I have to use a PCMCIA card instead, and sleep support isn't yet implemented for its graphics card - IMHO they generally make very nice Linux machines indeed and most of the hardware is well-supported. > Is it possible to load up the PowerPC bootable CD image in one of > those colourful iMacs and install? Yup. > The software manual from IBM says it's a 32/64-bit machine. I'm > thinking of buying an iMac, 333MHz PowerPC G3 machine. Is it 32 or > 64-bit? 32-bit. FWIW, G4 systems are quite affordable now, but a G3 should be usable too. > Where is the documentation for PowerPC architectures, in terms of how > the system boots and such? I have the software manual from IBM, but it > doesn't detail anything about the BIOS or getting the machine > bootstrapped. I'd like to refer to this while studying the source code > for the PowerPC architecture-specific parts. The best concise documentation of the PowerMac boot process I've seen is the bootstrap(8) manual page from the yaboot package on www.penguinppc.org. > Also, if you're a ppc hacker, please let me know of any useful books > on ppc assembly language programming you've used. I'm not a PPC hacker at that level, unfortunately. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
