I'm trying to get Debian installed on a Power Computing PowerWave
604/132 (circa 1995) with a Sonnet Crescendo/PCI G3 accelerator [1]
(circa 1999). Some months ago I successfully installed and ran
Yellow Dog Linux 1.0 on this same hardware configuration and used
BootX to dual-boot with MacOS.
Guided by the Debian installation TOC [2], and after much
trial-and-error (details at the end), I finally fought my way to the
point of rebooting (the "Moment of Truth," 7.19 in the installation
manual; see [3]). But I can't get the partially installed system to
boot cleanly into Linux and complete the installation.
The problem of the moment is that the boot process hangs (or rather,
loops indefinitely) at statement:
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Any idea idea what causes this and how to fix it?
[1] http://www.sonnettech.com/product/matrix/matrix_ppc.html
[2] http://www.debian.org/releases/potato/powerpc/install
[3]
http://www.debian.org/releases/potato/powerpc/ch-init-config.en.html#s-base-boot
[4]
http://www.debian.org/releases/potato/powerpc/ch-init-config.en.html#-install-os
[5]
ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-powerpc/current/powermac/ramdisk.image.gz
In the next two sections, for the terminally curious or the simply
masochistic, are details of the sequence I went through and two ques-
tions for which I think I've found answers.
---------------------
Sequence
---------------------
First I set up BootX 1.2.2 under System 8.0 in a 120-MB Apple
partition. To boot into dbootstrap I specified as RAM disk the file
ramdisk.image.gz [5]; to attempt booting Linux I disabled the RAM
disk option, cleared the "More kernel arguments" field, and used "sda8"
in the "Root device" field.
dbootstrap details --
These are the tasks I did, in order:
__________________
7.4 Configure the Keyboard
7.6 Partition a Hard Disk
swap ~200 MB (RAM = 96 MB)
log ~500 MB
root ~5.3 GB
7.7 Initialize and Activate a Swap Partition
7.8 Initialize a Linux Partition
(For first root, then log, mounted as /var/log.)
7.14 Configure the Network
Set manually, not via DHCP. See 7.11 below.
7.11 Install Operating System Kernel and Modules
After this step [4], a minimal system exists in / (in RAM disk
I believe), and the system being installed is in /target. This
is where the root partition is mounted. This system isn't
functional. None of the programs there (perl, for instance)
can find what they're looking for in /lib, /usr, etc.
I installed from the network. This worked as long as I had set
IP, gateway, and DNS by hand in step 7.14. If I used DHCP,
though the values ended up the same as what I had set manually,
Linux could not reach any outside machine nor get DNS resolved.
This step never worked if I tried to install using floppies.
After requesting the first driver disk, the installer gave
the following error message, identically, no matter what
floppy was inserted:
This is disk 1 of 2 in the drv14pmac series of 15-Apr-2001 01:50 CDT.
Wrong disk. This is from series drv14pmac.
You need disk 1 of series the driver series.
7.16 Configure the Base System
7.17 Make Linux Bootable Directly From Hard Disk
At first I tried defining a separate boot partition. Under
this condition, step 7.17 always gave the error "Installing
QUIK is not yet possible for Debian/PowerPC". I tried without
a separate boot partition (the install created the directory
/boot under /template) and the error went away -- QUIK
programs and data now exist on the unfinished system.
But is Quik used at all in an environment where BootX controls
booting?
Failed here:
__________________
7.19 The Moment of Truth
At first attempt, on reboot the process stopped at "Kernel
panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 08:06". This was due to
garbage in the "More kernel arguments" field of BootX. (Also,
boot device wasn't set properly at sda8.)
Now the boot sequence gets farther and loops on 'INIT: Id "1"
respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes'. Earlier in the
process, there were many undefined symbols in 2.2.19/pcmcia
(I did not install it). Also, "base-config" was not built
with debconfig. Yes, we know...
Did not do these:
__________________
7.9 Mount a Previously-Initialized Partition
7.12 Configure PCMCIA Support
7.13 Configure Device Driver Modules
7.15 Install the Base System
This always told me, "It looks like you have already installed
a base system or Debian is already installed..."
7.18 Make a Boot Floppy
Error: "Creating a boot floppy is still not possible for
PowerPC/PowerMac"
Never got this far:
__________________
7.20 Debian Post-Boot (Base) Configuration
7.21 MD5 Passwords
7.22 Shadow Passwords
7.23 Set the Root Password
7.24 Create an Ordinary User
7.25 Setting Up PPP
7.26 Removing PCMCIA
7.27 Configuring APT
7.28 Package Installation: Simple or Advanced
7.29 Simple Package Selection -- The Task Installer
7.30 Advanced Package Selection with dselect
7.31 Log In
---------------------
Questions
(to which I may
have answers)
---------------------
1. Is a Power Computing PowerWave 604/132 (circa 1995) with a Sonnet
Crescendo/PCI G3 accelerator (circa 1999) a "New World" machine
or "Old World?"
A: The top Debian install page [6] is no help, mentioning the
Power Computing machines only under the catch-all "unsorted"
category. According to [7]:
(The old world PCI systems:) This category contains most Power
Macintoshes with a floppy drive and a PCI bus. They use an
older, buggier revision of the Open Firmware than the new world
machines, but can boot Linux either directly from Open Firmware
(via Quik), directly from the MacOS ROM (via miBoot), or from
within MacOS (via BootX). Of these, only the BootX method
flexibly supports dual-booting.
This includes most 603, 603e, 604, and 604e based Power
Macintoshes, including the 7200, 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600,
9500, and 9600.
(The new world systems:) This category contains the Power
Macintosh systems from mid-1998 onwards. They use a more
complete Open Firmware bootloader, which supports booting from a
network or an ISO9660 CD-ROM, as well as...
These machines include most G3 systems, the iMacs, and G4
systems.
2. Does this hardware combination support Open Firmware?
A: Apparently so. See above statement, "[Old World machines]
use an older, buggier revision of the Open Firmware than the
new world machines..." Also, bootvars 1.3b works. But
cmd-option-o-f or cmd-option-shift-O-F at boot time do
nothing.
[6] http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/install
[7]
ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-powerpc/current/powermac/install.txt
