Yesterday, I got an iMac (NewWorld) to play with at work, and decided to install woody on it. It has no floppy drive, so the only bootable woody installation media that I could find were ISO images at:
http://people.debian.org/~ieure/netinst/ which I burned onto CD-R. Unfortunately, at the time there were only images from last December[0] labeled "3.0pre", which contained at least one major known bug (the bad mac-fdisk) which stopped my installation in its tracks). I was able to continue the installation by bringing up the network (which worked flawlessly via DHCP) and wget'ing a fixed mac-fdisk from the 3.0.19 floppy images. I couldn't figure out how to tag a partition as swap, this being my first PowerPC installation. the mac-fdisk help was not helpful). I continued without one, and have since learned (from http://penguinppc.org/projects/yaboot/doc/mac-fdisk-basics.shtml linked from the release notes) that it should be named 'swap'. I assume this would have worked; if so, it should be mentioned directly in the release notes. In tasksel, I selected "X window system", "desktop environment", "C and C++" and "Python". During package configuration, I was bitten by pydb #133520, which is fixed and should get into woody eventually. If it doesn't, tasksel #129520 removes pydb from the task anyway. After all packages were installed, I set about trying to get X working, and (after using the debconf prompts to get an initial configuration) co-workers and I fiddled with it for some time before discovering that we had to specify the PCI BusID in XF86Config-4, and google for the correct monitor sync information. I don't know why I had to specify the BusID, as it detected the video card (an ATI) at the correct PCI bus/slot/func during initialization. I had a Device section specifying Driver "ati", but until I added the BusID parameter, it said that it couldn't find a matching device section for the card. Once the X server was working, I was very confused to find that no window manager had been installed, nor had xterm. Fortunately, gnome-terminal was there from the desktop environment task. I assume this was tasksel #129217. To summarize: - boot-floppies 3.0.19 has a fix for the mac-fdisk problem - pydb 1.01-5 fixes #133520 (urgency=low) - tasksel 1.15 fixes #129217 and #129520 (urgency=low) The new tasksel will make it into woody in 2 days according to update_excuses.html, and boot-floppies 3.0.19 is already current, so my problems seem to be already fixed and propagating. The situation with tasksel is confusing, though; how does the delay help, when tasksel will only really be tested during new installations? Also, how can I help to test future PowerPC boot-floppies? Is there some way to network-boot this beast, or do I have to continue to use CD-Rs? [0] There seem to be 3.0.19 ISOs at that URL as of today. Thanks to Ian Eure for providing these so that I could get up and running with woody -- - mdz
