I've had a bit of time, so I've had another go at this. I grabbed the installer from:
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-powerpc/rc1/images/powerpc/netboot/ (Both vmlinuz/initrd.gz from that directory [ie 2.6] and also the same from the 2.4 subdirectory) Still using BootX 1.2 to boot up from MacOS. I spent some time with Google and found: http://www.jonh.net/lppcfom-serve/cache/1043.html and some experimentation lead to the fact that "video=platinumfb:vmode:6,cmode:8" (ie force [EMAIL PROTECTED] and 256 colours) gave me all consoles working fine, with the 2.4 kernel. With 2.6 nothing other than the first console came up ok. After that I had network issues. 2.4 detects the internal ethernet fine and when handed the IP address successfully get the hostname via rDNS (I don't run DHCP on my local lan). However once it gets to fetching the Releases file it fails to do so. 2.6 doesn't detect the network card and when told to use the MACE driver doesn't even manage to get the hostname via rDNS. I shoved a via-rhine card into one of the PCI slots and 2.6 auto-detected it fine. And then failed to detect the onboard SCSI. So I gave up and went back to 2.4, which at least had the other consoles for debugging. 2.4 found both ethernet cards and offered me the choice, so I chose the via-rhine. Worked fine. Got to disk selection and chose to reformat the ext3 / from last time and it auto-reused the swap. Base install all went fine; no kernel issues like last time. Rebooted into base-config (still using BootX so obviously had to modify the root device by hand), worked fine. No further issues; all seemed to install ok. As an experiment I booted into the installed 2.4.25 kernel and tried the onboard ethernet and got the same issues - very slow data transfer rate, to the point where it's unusable. So, the kernel installation problem is fixed. The colours on the VTYs is fixed with the right boot options. And the fstab stuff is fixed. Which leaves only the onboard network issue really (and the SCSI stuff under 2.6, though it works fine under 2.4). The onboard network seems to work fine under MacOS, so I don't think it's a hardware issue. J. -- /-\ | Replace repetitive expressions by |@/ Debian GNU/Linux Developer | calls to a common function. \- | -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
