On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 05:02:32PM +0100, Jerome RICHARD wrote: > I've seen in the debian powerpc mailing list that you have installed a > debian on a PowerBook G4 12". > > I've just buyed one and the Debian CD-ROM don't boot (But boot on a > eMac). Do you know how I should do ?
Yes, and since this took a lot of work and fooling around, I thought I should post a summary to this list and to a web page (since I'm lazy I'll probably start by just posting this email at http://valla.uchicago.edu/ppc/pbG412.html). First of all, I couldn't boot from the CD either. I put yaboot, yaboot.conf, root.bin and a kernel (another challenge: see next paragraph) on the OS X partition, per Branden's instructions for the iBook at http://people.debian.org/~branden/ibook.html, and booted into open firmware and entered: boot hd:3,yaboot I'm not completely sure that it was hd:3 -- do a 'df' in OS X and see what partition it is, because there aren't as many driver partitions as there used to be, but there's at least one more than you actually need. My OS X root is now /dev/disk0s2, which would be hd:2. That will get you booting into the boot-floppies installer. But when you get to the step of partitioning/initializing/mounting your hard drive, the kernel you get from http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/current/new-powermac/ will tell you "No hard disks were found." If you look at /dev/hda you'll see that it's your optical drive. The problem is that this disk is ATA-100, and the current kernels are only for ATA-66. I had to build a kernel that supported ATA-100, but I still don't know what chipset this machine is using (anybody?) so I just added them all -- not an elegant solution, but it works. It makes for a 3.8 MB kernel image, but you can download it at http://valla.uchicago.edu/ppc/vmlinux-pbg412.bz2 (you probably need to bunzip2 it for it to boot). So put my kernel (or your own-built kernel with the right ATA chipset support, as long as you tell me what it is) in /vmlinux on your OS X partition, reboot with cmd+opt+O+F, boot hd:3,yaboot or whatever is right (you could tell me this as well, if people are going to refer to my web page or this email thread). From there things should be okay -- the hard drive is /dev/hdc, and you can read the packages off the CD just fine, even if you can't boot from it. After you install, you should boot to OS X, change OSX:/yaboot.conf to point at your GNU root partition and remove the line about root.bin, then reboot with hd:3,yaboot or whatever (still from the OS X partition). My kernel has support for cpu frequency scaling via /proc/cpufreq -- and now when it boots it claims to be at 53 MHz. You can get this up to the proper 867 MHz by doing echo -n "1000000:2000000:performance" > /proc/cpufreq but in practice I haven't noticed this making much of a difference -- I mean, the machine isn't actually running at 53 MHz. If you're building this for your own kernel you need the patch that benh sent: http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2003/debian-powerpc-200302/msg00106.html (this works great). And this message http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2003/debian-powerpc-200302/msg00094.html is useful, since it sends you here: http://penguinppc.org/~daniels/README for XFree86, which works, but only once per boot -- if you exit XFree, the screen goes black and you pretty much have to reboot over ssh. You should install the newest version of yaboot from http://penguinppc.org/projects/yaboot , because it's supposed work with our hardware -- though it still isn't working for me to boot directly into GNU/Linux without going through Open Firmware. I might be making some stupid mistake here, even though I haven't had this kind of trouble with yaboot before. When I try to boot to GNU by default I get a folder with a question mark, then a folder with a finder-face on it, then it boots OS X. It also doesn't seem to be recognizing "enablecdboot" or "enableofboot" but, again, I might be the one with the problem. But so I still boot Open Firmware and do boot hd:4,yaboot to boot to GNU without going through OS X (hd:4 being my yaboot bootstrap partition.) hd:3,yaboot also works, since both kernels are identical for me right now. Sound and DVD-playing work just as in the iBook. APM correctly shows battery level. I still haven't tried burning a CD or a DVD. I'd like it if I could help in some way with getting pmud and Airport Extreme working, but I don't know what I can do to help. I'm asking a question, there. Hope this helps, O.
