I've got a beige G3 tower that I've been trying to install debian on. I can get it installed, but it tends to freeze hard (no kernel messages, no nothing) when doing intensive I/O. I thought it could be a hardware problem, so I disconnected all the PCI cards and drives except for the hard drive and floppy drive, and it still doesn't work. I took the RAM out, put it in a PC and tested it using memtest86. There were 3 SIMMs in there, so I've tried installing it using each one of the SIMMs individually. I bought a brand new hard drive and that still didn't work.
I have tried using MacOS 9.0 and 9.1 with BootX to boot, using 2.2 and 2.4 kernels from stable and testing, respectively. None of the configurations work - 2.4 actually seems worse, usually panicking when it calculates module dependencies at boot time. It strikes me as a hardware or firmware problem, but I have no clue about what else to test. Any ideas? -Brian Pike