Hardware:
PowerMac 6500/225 with 128MB of RAM and a 6GB SCSI disk
partitioned as 2.5GB for MacOS, 3.0 GB for Linux root (an
"all-in-one" filesystem) and 500 MB for Linux swap. It also has a
SCSI CD-RW drive and a floppy drive.
Software: MacOS 9.1 with Roxio "Toast" for the CD-RW drive.
Following the call for testers in Debian Weekly News - January
20th, 2004, I decided to give it a try.
The Beta2 d-i for PowerPC doesn't support OldWorld PowerMacs, but
armed with my trusty copy of BootX, I figured I could do anything
yaboot could do. Amazingly, I succeeded in getting it to boot and
run the installer! (Some problems remain, but I'm sure they can
be solved...)
Here's what I did.
I downloaded a recent 40 MB install CD image from
http://people.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/powerpc/beta2/sarge-powerpc-businesscard.iso
and burned it to a CD.
I copied the "root.bin" initial ramdisk file from the CD's
/install/powermac directory into my MacOS System Folder.
I did the same for the "vmlinux" file, putting it in the "Linux
Kernels" folder in the System Folder.
I activated BootX and told it to boot the new kernel and use the
new initial ramdisk. After some experimentation (in which I
discovered a lot of option combinations that *didn't* work!) I
gave it the kernel argument "devfs=mount", and left all options
for video modes *un*set.
It booted Linux and gave me a 640x480 console running the d-i
beta2 installer.
I answered the questions it asked about locale and keyboard type,
and it started installing.
It asked for a hostname and tried to do some DHCP magic to figure
out what my network looked like. I said to myself, "this is not
going to work." because my very minimal DHCP server is setup to
help my laser printer configure itself, and nothing else. All
other machines have static network configurations. But it does
seems to have worked at least partially, because it was able to
retrieve and install a bunch of software.
I'm currently stuck almost at the end of the install, because it
insists on trying to install yaboot. This is impossible on an
OldWorld Mac. I may have to do a loopback mount of the ISO so I
can do a little surgery on the install scripts to allow me to
gracefully bail out of the yaboot install when I burn the next CD.
I'll keep y'all posted of my progress.
Rick
