I've just managed to get Debian installed on a PowerMac 4400/200. The base install wasn't too hard, but getting X to work was a bear.
Finally, I've gotten X to work. Now I'm trying to get Mac-on-Linux (MOL) to work. If you're at all familiar with MOL, you know it's very Redhat-centric. So rather than try to work with the RPM, I tried to compile it from source, but I kept running into a "can't find curses.h" problem. I also see this problem when trying to run "make menuconfig" (although this problem may be related to dialog.h instead of curses.h; the error message is: "dialog.h:29: curses.h: No such file or directory"). This is really more of a curiosity than a problem at this point, but does anyone know what's up with the missing "curses.h"? I found very little on the web about this subject. So I gave up on trying to compile the source code, and used alien to install the MOL RPM. Since the 4400 is a 603(e), MOL couldn't apply run-time patches to the kernel, which forced me to run a MOL-supplied patch and recompile the kernel. Since I had read that 2.2.15 had problems (which is what I started with on this Mac), I downloaded the source for 2.2.16 (I couldn't find 2.2.16 on the Debian site, only older versions and 2.2.17pre6 -- why isn't 2.2.16 there? aren't the even-numbered versions stable and the odd ones developmental?) from one of the major sites (linux.org? linux.com? I don't remember now). I applied the patch and then compiled the kernel, turning on the MOL component. After the reboot, everything looks fine, but when I try to run "startmol" it complains about a ROM image. Doh! I knew that. So I downloaded the utility to take a snapshot of the Mac ROM, and moved the image to /usr/lib/mol/rom/rom.nw and pointed my /etc/molrc to that file. This time, "startmol" does better, but reports: Running in PowerPC 750 mode (G3) newworld: elf32_getehdr failed cleaning up... Terminating threads DONE Is the claim of running in G3 mode significant, since I don't have a G3 but rather a 4400? I searched the web for "elf32_getehdr failed" and found very little; just the printf lines in some code that apparently generate this error message. Thinking that maybe some package needed to be installed, I tried to "apt-get install libelf", but it complained that libelf conflicted with libelfg0, and when I tried to remove libelfg0, it complained that it was being depended on by various packages, such as make and dpkg. I wasn't about to hose dpkg by going any further, so I set things back to the way they should be and decided to ask this list if anyone had any ideas. Thanks! -- Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED]
