On Sun, Dec 31, 2000 at 07:48:50PM -0600, Garry Roseman wrote:
I bought the new official Potato CD set, 2.2r2, and tried installing
Debian ppc on my PowerMac clone, a PowerComputing PowerWave 150 (it's
an Old World PCI Mac, like a 7600).
First, the CD is not bootable on that computer or on my PowerMac
> 7600. .....
As someone explained, you need Toast or another program with a license
to the Apple CD drivers to create bootable cds. It's also quite tricky
to set up the system folder to do it; it requires messing with miBoot,
and I don't recommend it.
Actually, that's something I could do! But the clue offered by Cole
Stewart is what got my installation going. I copied the kernel and
the ramdisk image from the CD into the Linux Kernels folder of the
HFS partition with MacOS and let BootX put me into the installer. [I
hadn't realized that the ramdisk image ran the dbootstrap installer.
I didn't know what the ramdisk image was for <doh>. It doesn't point
out this possibility of using BootX with ramdisk.image in the
installation manual, although I suppose it's obvious after Sufficient
Pondering.]
To give an idea of what us newbies go through trying to install
Debian powerpc -- I have three SCSI drives on the target machine with
a total of 14 partitions (set up to get good performance and allow
sharing of some directories via NFS). I stepped through the
partitioning, meticulously defining the starting block and length of
each partition FOUR TIMES! The first three times I couldn't get the
installer to agree that I had defined any swap partitions. I had
used fdisk's C command (not the c command) and had described the
partition type as "swap", "Swap", and "Linux swap". Finally on a
hunch I named all swap partitions "swap" instead of "swap1" and
"swap2" as I had been doing. Bingo! That wins! But who would know
that the swap partition is detected by its name and not by its type?
> Second, the install floppies can't be used for installing. The first
image, the boot floppy, which I created on my functioning Debian
Linux box using dd, does boot the PowerComputing machine and then
asks for the root disk. When I insert the root disk and hit return
> nothing happens.
Well, now, I'm confused. You're not the first person to report this;
it's as iff something is completely hosed with that kernel. I tried it
on a G4 (dual tower), and the USB support worked just fine. If anyone
could shed light on this I'd be quite greatful.
I can't shed any further light except to note that using BootX with
the kernel from the CD, not the kernel in the floppy image, along
with the ramdisk.image, worked fine.
Thanks guys. It turned out to be a successful New Year Day.
--
Garry Roseman <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
