Hi Alex! On 12/28/20 9:31 PM, Alex Perez wrote: > 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.
Correct. GRUB is incompatible with the old version of OpenFirmware used on these machines. > 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. Great to hear. > 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. The color problems are most likely an endianness issue. Which X.org driver are you using? Check the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log. > 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. Yaboot was no longer maintained upstream and has had multiple build issues and was incompatible with modern versions of ext4. Someone has revived Yaboot upstream, however, and if I find the time to work on it, I might go ahead and update the Debian package [1]. Help is always welcome. Adrian > [1] https://github.com/rsaxvc/yaboot4 -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
