I installed a debian system on a PowerMac G4 some time ago. I had to do
this because there were no boot CDs available at that time and of course
the PowerMac does not have a floppy drive. You can check the
debian-powerpc archives for details of how to do it. Mail from Ethan
Benson was the most helpful. Here is a summary (from my memory so it
might not be 100% accurate).
Put a kernel on the zip disk.
Put baseXXX.tgz on zip disk.
Put the drivers.tgz on zip disk.
Get your bootroms to load the kernel. I don't think you can do this
directly with the PC BIOS. I could with the PowerMac OpenFirmware
prompt. For an Intel PC, you may have to setup lilo on a floppy.
Infact, you should be able to use the standard boot floppies. You
should be able to give a root=/dev/hdc (or whatever the zip drive is).
Play around with these ideas.
Good luck,
Brendan Simon.
i4G0 wrote:
well, i need help. i'd like to install a debian system on my laptop.
that's an old Compaq Contura 410c
it has 8mb ram, 330mb hd. it's a 486 cpu. take a look at if you want to get
more infos.
i have an Iomega Zip unit..
someone else installed a debian system from a zip disk? someone can help me
installing it?
my problem is: how can i make a working ramdisk on my zip?
and also: how can i create a bootdisk that makes the zip work?
finally: which .deb should i choose? which is the base system? ftp archives?
where?
thank you anticipately.
