Hi folks, I just wanted to share that I was able to succesfully boot and install Debian 10 using the "official" Debian 10 netinst CD from [1], with the exception of the bootloader, which failed, and I had to handle manually. I also tried booting from the latest snapshot CD image [2], which completely fails to boot, I assume due to the lack of yaboot on the latest image, which is unfortunate, as this appears to be the only way to boot Lombard-based systems, due to the version of OpenFirmware. Despite the hardware being 23 years old, it's usable with Debian 10, and the on-board 100 megabit Ethernet worked fine, out of the box. I'm booting from a 32GB SanDisk Ultra CompactFlash card, installed in the 2.5" drive bay.
Subsequent to the install, I did an update to unstable, and am running kernel 5.9 without issues. Even Xorg starts, and works (ATI Rage LT), albeit with a bit of "wrong color" pixels here and there. I'm not sure why, but it's tolerable as-is. So, I'm wondering what the rationale for removal of yaboot was, given that it excludes a class of machines that were produced in large quantities, where Debian otherwise works fine, except for GRUB/yaboot support. [1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/powerpc/iso-cd/debian-10.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso [2] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2020-12-03/debian-10.0.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso
