On Thu 2017-09-21 10:26:08 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > I like this idea but i don't have a lot of spare machines handy to try > d-i on these days. I can try to dig up a power supply for an idle older > ppc laptop i've got floating around, but i don't know whether i'll be > able to find it.
I should mention: i currently run (and have run in the past) many powerpc systems (old Mac hardware, mainly, running an OpenFirmware forth shell from the mainboard), all of which i either directly installed with grub (via debootstrap from debirf) or converted from yaboot to grub. I've yet to find one (even a really old blue clamshell iBook with 64MiB of RAM) that grub didn't work for me on in the end. So for the machines i've dealt with, the question is more about d-i integration than about whether grub will work or not. I do note that there have been some interesting endianness issues (e.g. channel-swap, or palette inversion) with the colorspace when trying to use grub's graphical mode (but i've seen similar issues with non-grub stuff as well). I don't know how much we care in this discussion about grub's graphical capabilities, as compared to its booting capabilities. yaboot had no graphical capabilities at all, iirc. --dkg