Little note on hardware... I actually wrote this to some friends at 2am last night... - StarMax 4000 - Using IDE drives - PS/2 keyboard/mouse (but I tried the ADB stuff when the keymapping hosed) - Had LinuxPPC 1999 installed before - Using BootX - Used one of my compiled kernels a few times when I needed to get it
Now that makes me want to go out and kill things. Debian PPC is in Sid still for a *very* good reason... it is nearly impossible to install. In fact there is *no* way to install it with the install images available... I guess I shouldn't say no way because after 7 hours of hacking I managed to get a working install. - the rescue disk image is either corrupted or just don't work... linux doesn't think there is a valid FS on it (downloaded it twice just to be sure) - the install program is broke. It's setup to look for the powermac stuff in a "Power" directory when it is supposed to be a "powermac" directory. I couldn't get the install to swallow grabbing the stuff normally on the rescue disk from a modified http source. I had to burn the tree it wanted on CD to get it to swallow it. - the install program has some "issues" with figuring out whether or not a CD is mounted already... behaves really nasty when it gets screwed up (bumps you back to one of several different screens which seems at random) - the install program is looking for keymap's named *.bmp.gz, the file has them called *.bmap.gz, and I think in reality they are supposed to be *.kmap.gz... doesn't really matter since it is grabbing the i386 keymap which makes the machine unusable if you ever get the thing booted off the hard drive (fortunately single user mode is your friend... deleting the /root/dbbootstrap_settings and /etc/console-tools/default.kmap.gz files takes care of it) - the install OS kernel and modules is bogus too... fortunately you can get enough stuff without modules to get the machine seeing the net Fortunately it is now installed and behaving happily... hopefully this torture will pay for itself in the long run with upgrades being trivial. I'm frightened to think what installing Debian on an Alpha is going to be like. Makes the Debian i386 installs feel like a nice back massage :) Brian Macy
