On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 10:34:14AM +1100, Brendan J Simon wrote: > > Are the boot disks going to be "ready" for the upcoming relesae of > powerpc-potato in February (it is still February isn't it ?) ? > > I want to buy a PowerBook but am waiting for Debian to be officially > released and with boot floopies to install on my PowerBook. I really do > not want to preinstall any other OS like Yellowdog or LinuxPPC, before I > can install Debian. > > Is Yaboot required ? I assume this is the equivalent of lilo on a x86 > machine. > Do I "have" to allocate a 800KB HFS partition on my hard disk ?
if you are buying a new powerbook it will be a `newworld' archetecture, this means it has no MacOS hardware ROM, only a small boot ROM containing a `less broken' OF then older macs had. the thing is oldworld OF would load a bootblock (like PC's do) but it was so horridly broken that booting anything but MacOS is a real chore. Newworld OF is not so broken but it won't load a bootblock, this means either boot with MacOS (meaning you need a 100MB HFS partition instead of 800K) or a 800K bootstrap partition to act as a pseudo bootblock. I prefer the latter as i have little need for macos and it will be gone as soon as that small need goes away (testing macos stuff) I wrote some scripts to make dealing with the bootstrap partition almost exactly like dealing with lilo, to me its just an 800K bootblock with its own device file in /dev/ ;-) > I've installed Debian-2.1 on an intel machine once. All I needed was a > boot disk and the base*tgz file. Will it be exactly the same for a > powerpc machine ? hard to say, unfortuantely booting PPCs (not just macs) is radically different from machine to machine. -- Ethan Benson
