I did something I never thought today: I bought a couple boxes of floppies.
deja vu I know this may be a bit redundant, but I wanted Sven L. and Rick T. to know I tried to use the PowerPC daily floppies from http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc/floppy-2.4/ http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/miboot/ and http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc/floppy/ (I don't what I'm supposed to do with the net-boot images, honestly.) Machine: PowerMac G3 Beige 740/740 processor : 0 cpu : 740/750 temperature : 31-33 C (uncalibrated) clock : 233MHz revision : 2.2 (pvr 0008 0202) bogomips : 465.92 machine : Power Macintosh motherboard : AAPL,Gossamer MacRISC detected as : 48 (PowerMac G3 (Gossamer)) pmac flags : 00000000 L2 cache : 512K unified pipelined-syncro-burst memory : 64MB l2cr override : 0xa9100000 pmac-generation : OldWorld ATA and SCSI disks... (This is the same machine I successfully installed via netinst and full-blown iso CD's yesterday.) 2.4 Today's result, as I've seen Rick and others observe, the ofonlyboot.img is read and spit out. Without a prompt, I inserted the root.img and nothing happened. Once I got the weird video reversal of tuxmac mentioned prior. Each time the root.img is inserted, nothing else happens. (Where's that paper clip!?) miboot Just for fun, I downloaded the month-old miboot floppies. Echoing, I got tux waxed with a red X at the end of reading the boot.img. With the ofonlyboot.img, the Mac spewed it out quickly. 2.6 ofonlyboot.img gave me tux in framebuffer corner looking like he was behind an xray machine with a cartoon bomb in his lap. BUT, although the Mac didn't spit the disk, I gave it root.img anyway; it read it, and I'm going to make some language selections here. OK, I used the ash console to see what modules were there already... none. I loaded network-dirvers.img and configured eth0 manually. What's next ... Debian mirror or CD? Hmmm. cd-drivers.img Sniffed out a bad mirror: slugsite.louisville.edu I'll use ftp.us.debian.org. I guess the adb keyboard looks like usb, that's what defaults. Wow there's a lot of ide chipset modules suggesting to be installed! Scanning CD. That thing's a week old. D-i says wrong kernel module versions. Choose network install. Nope, no mathich modules. I selected testing at the mirror screen. Well, let's try sid.. Hmm. It likes sid modules! But I thought this was sarge installation. No choice now but to install sid, I guess. I checked the floppies out already anyway. Suggestions? No? OK, here we go. This is different. A choice for low priority packages. Not bad. The screen is smoother, better graphics than CD install for some reason. frame buffer detection works? Higher reolution and better font! Manually partion... Ah, detected and defaulted to correct file type on existing partions, good. Detects and chooses existing swap. Defaults to not erase data. We don't have that progress bar for rebuilding the partion table screen anymore on each partion finish. Great! Looks like it's going well. I'll do the rest in the installation-report. As I read more daily, maybe I'll get to use the net-boot images? Regards, Duane Cottle
