On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 2:53 PM Paul Duncan <[email protected]> wrote: > > My 15 year old son has found an old 2011 iMac in the side of the road. Long > story short is that the processor probably works, but we think the GPU is > dead as we cannot get video out of the mini display port connector, or the > screen. > > So, I would like to boot from a Debian live ISO with the following kernel > parameters (set in grub.cfg). > > console=ttyUSB0,19200n8 > > Now, I can mount up the ISO in loop mode, and get into grub.cfg, but how do I > write this back to the ISO so that I can put in on a USB flash drive?
I'm not sure about your technical problems. Usually you need a blessed Apple partition to boot an old Mac. I also seem to recall you may need to boot to a CD rather than a USB device on some models. I have a PowerMac G5 that needs to boot like that (CD instead of USB). But you will find the folks who keep the old PowerMac's alive at the debian-powerpc mailing list (<https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/>). Many folks on the list are fanatics, and they can probably answer all your questions (and more). Jeff
