You should know that I tried very hard to follow the PowerPC instructions as written for my Mac 8500, and I ran completely into a stone wall.
If I hadn't done a lot of google searching, I never would have installed Debian on my PowerPC. My very first debian installation of any sort was Saturday night on my 8500, and the hardest part was working around the obscure instructions. Once I succeeded in getting the base package installed, and also reaching the internet through my NAT server (I still don't know why this didn't just work, but I couldn't use my local caching nameserver, I had to use the ISP's nameserver, and it took me several hours to figure out that nameservice was actually the problem), I could just go to bed and let 80 megabytes of packages download over the modem. When I got up there were just a few config questions to answer and I was all set. It took me a long time to realize that TFTP booting wouldn't work on the 8500. I read all the dire warnings about floppy booting and figured TFTP would be the way to go, and jumped through a lot of hoops to figure out how to get BOOTP and TFTP set up on my Slackware laptop, and to get into open firmware from the screen and keyboard of the 8500 (using the Apple SystemDisk tool). I actually managed to download the boot file for Prep into the 8500, it rejected it after the download completed. Then I tried the floppy installation. The installation instructions link to a number of boot floppies for different models of Macintoshes, but do not include the separate link for the HFS boot floppy. It was only after the Mac rejected the rescue disk that I started hunting around the disk images directory directly in my browser and found the HFS floppy. But then I couldn't continue booting past the request to insert the ramdisk image floppy. So somewhere around here I went to www.debian.org and did a search for BootX, because I was hoping I could find another way to start up, without floppies. I still figured I'd have to do an NFS install and I hadn't set up NFS on my slackware box. It was then that I found the alternate installation instructions, extremely brief but they contained the critical information I needed that was omitted from the "official" instructions: http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/pmac the install instructions are six lines on this page, with six lines of download files, but if it weren't for this page I would simply have had no hope of installing. And it wasn't necessary to configure NFS; I just put all the files I needed on an HFS disk on my Mac; I had a whole separate disk to dedicate to Linux. So there's a few more criticisms: - after you start up in your initial install and you're trying to initialize apt for the first time, you should be given more diagnostic information as to when something is going wrong with the network connection, and you should be given the opportunity to reconfigure the network without having to restart and re-do the installation. My problem was that Debian was unhappy with my choice of nameserver and I must have rebooted and reinstalled my base install four or five times for the sole purpose of trying out different network configurations. - I tried plugging directly into the modem but couldn't figure out which serial port to use. The configuration utility unhelpfully tells you which modem devices correspond to COM1:, etc. under DOS. What is the "Modem Port" on a Macintosh? I kept getting errors that flew by too quickly to read but that referred to /dev/modem - the Macintosh disk partitioning utility should tell you what partition types are commonly used. It should either just list out all the known types or give you a menu that you can pick by number. It took me a long time to figure out what to do to make sure I got the right partition types, because I wanted an HFS partition on part of the disk, as well as several linux native and a linux swap. I was unaware that linux swap uses the same partition type on PowerMac as ext2. They're not the same partition type on a PC, so I expected them to be different on a Mac as well. On the whole, things went well. I've had worse experiences, such as the time the slackware installer ran out of space on my machine and made it unbootable. I had to reformat the drive to repair the mess. And nothing can top the experience I had when I launched the windows NT installer under windows 98 on my laptop - NT doesn't understand the partition map on drives larger than 8 GB. Rather than just doing the safe thing and not touching the partition map, it destroyed it and corrupted my FAT filesystem. I had to repartition the drive, and I only saved my Windows files because the BeOS was able to boot off a floppy and read a damaged fat partition. Mike
