On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 05:41:29PM -0500, Myria wrote: > > Hi List, > > The computer of interest is a Macintosh 9500 with a MaxPower G3 upgrade card > at 300MHz. 117MB RAM, and three hd. 2 hd are on the internal scsi buss and > one is on an Adaptec scsi controller. The primary (about 1.2GB) hd is running > Mac OS 9.1. The second hd is also 1.2GB and is empty. The wide scsi hd from > the Adaptex controller is 4.5GB. > > The external scsi buss is used for things like cd burner, external hd, > removable syquest and MO disks. There is no permanent scsi chain on the > external buss. I do have some spare 4.5GB and 9GB in storage. > > The 9500 is on an AppleTalk network to share a printer. Internet connection > is through a dialup connection. > > The question: Can Debian Woody be installed on an empty hard drive without > any Mac OS at all. In such a case the computer will recognize the OS from the > primary hd and allow me to "switch" to the Debian hd, I hope. Or must the > Debian hd have somepart of Mac OS on it?
Yes. No. The only caveat is that you make the choice for what kind of computer it's going to be at boot; you don't switch from one to the other. OTOH, If that IS what you want to do, there's Mac-on-Linux (MOL) which will run MacOS inside Linux. And it works well, I understand. On a 9500, you will be able to make the choice of which system to boot fairly easily. With quik (the default boot loader) you can have it stop at OpenFirmware, and either type boot for Linux or bye for MacOS. Or BootX is a Mac extension that interrupts the Mac booting process and diverts over to Linux, giving you a few seconds to decide which one should be booted. > I have installed Red Hat and SuSE on some Intel boxes and the intalls were > ok. The Intel boxes are structly Linux distros, no other OS. I am looking for > a distro that will run on both platforms and Debian seems to have a good > reputation. Will there be an installer in Debian somewhat like YAST2 from > SuSE? I'm not familiar with YAST, but the new Debian installer is under construction now; you might want to tune in to debian-boot for a while to see what's up. The powerpc port needs help, and some people are starting on a GTK-type GUI. > Will the Debian hd have any problem accessing the shared printer or using the > cd burner? You will need Linux drivers, that will depend on your hardware. BTW, all debian mailing lists are text-only, manual wrapping of lines is appreciated. -- "The way the Romans made sure their bridges worked is what we should do with software engineers. They put the designer under the bridge, and then they marched over it." -- Lawrence Bernstein, Discover, Feb 2003
