That will work, as long as I have a MacOS partition (which I do). Actually I have a whole darned Linuxppc2000 installation on the computer. Now I'm trying to learn about and compare Debian. I like the Debian thinking. My question was partly theoretical; I'd like to know how I could install the Debian system on a hypothetical client's PowerMac computer using only a floppy drive. I already know that I can do such an install from the Linuxppc2000 CD-ROM. Installing the Debian distrib onto a PowerMac from floppy only is impossible because I find no tool for making a floppy on MacOS from the Debian binary floppy image.
So far the right way to install onto a PowerMac (e.g. 7600 or PowerCenter etc.) appears to be to allocate a partition to MacOS, put bootx on it and the ramdisk compressed image, and boot into the Debian installer. I haven't done that yet and my next task is to discover what tools are available in that ramdisk kernel for completing the installation. Once you are in the ramdisk kernel, it is duck soup. You'll probably want to use C-M-F2 now and then, to get out of Dselect and roam the filesystems. Once Debian is installed, you can use dd to make floppies. If I were installing Debian on someone else's machine, I would like the feeling of being able to give them boot/rescue floppies. However, to save possible embarrassment, especially if my friend or client might object to foul language, I would make the floppies ahead of time. (One annoyance is that `cmp', one way to check whether the floppy is correctly written, seems to be broken in Potato.) Didn't I see something on a LinuxPPC site about somebody wearing one of their T-shirts...let's see, was it Ethan Benson? I don't think so...oh, it was Steve Wozniak. Maybe some hardware-savvy person could get from him some clues for improving floppy support... --- John
