On Sat, Dec 18, 2021, at 12:19 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > Hello Rick! > ... > Why didn't you use any of the snapshots that you previously used and > that are known to work? ... > Use a different, known to work image. >
OK, on Adrian's advice I used the NETINST iso from October 6, 2021, which I had successfully used on a mac-mini-G4 previously. In short, it worked. But the long story is more interesting: The CD booted fine. I chose the text-mode default installer. I accepted all the defaults until it came to time to partition the disk. I chose "guided - create LVM - use entire disk" for the partition scheme. All went as expected until it came time to write the partition tables to disk. At that point it complained about not having a /boot partition. I remembered hearing somewhere that a separate /boot partition was not strictly necessary as long as there was a /boot/grub partition that the firmware could access, because modern grub programs were able to find stuff from /boot even if it was buried in the root partition and the root partition was itself buried in an LVM partition. I verified that there was indeed a /boot/grub partition of type hfs in the proposed scheme. So I told it to ignore this problem and continue the installation without a /boot partition. It went ahead and created a /boot directory in the root partition, and put the kernel/initramfs and stuff there. A bit later it complained "Your boot partition is not located on the first primary partition of your hard disk ... Go back to the menu and correct the problem?" I remembered Adrian saying that we should ignore this, so I answered "no" It went ahead with configuring the package manager and installing Grub, all of which occurred without incident. I accepted all the default answers. It finished up and rebooted into the installed system without problem. Discussion: If it's true that modern grub can dig into an LVM containing root containing /boot, why is there any reason to want a separate /boot partition at all? Is this a feature that only applies to grub for powerpc? I really like the feature of having /boot be a directory in root, because it allows me to update kernels without first checking that there's enough space in the /boot partition for another kernel and initrd. I'd like to see it be at least an option, and (IMHO) preferably the default on all installs. This particular powermac-G4 is reserved for testing, so I'm happy to rest anything new from Adrian's workshop! Thanks for all the hard work, Rick
