Re: Debian Installer beta2 working on an OldWorld PowerMac-6500/225
On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 12:37:56AM +0100, Jeremie Koenig wrote: Hello Rick, I'm trying to get debian-installer working well on OldWorld systems. In order to achieve this, we need to : - have miBoot in Debian (for the boot floppy), - have a quik-installer udeb, as well as an openfirmware-configurator one, - it seems a miboot/bootx-installer package would be useful, too. Notice that it seems that bootx is capable of booting both the -powerpc and the -powerpc-small kernels, while miboot is able to boot only the second. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Installer beta2 working on an OldWorld PowerMac-6500/225
On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 02:15:20AM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote: 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...) Cool. 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. This will be solved in the next d-i uploads. I have uploaded yesterday a nobootloader package, which enable you to work without any bootloader, but ultimately, a quik-installer would be needed. Maybe Jeremie is already working on that ? Also, this means that it is possible to boot with bootx on oldworld, and that the default -powerpc-small that was selected in kernel-installer is probably not the right solution. A kernel to use kind of question might be welcome, and maybe there could also be some kind of auto-probing for which kernel was booted. BTW, these kind of things have more their place on the debian-boot mailing list, so i forward this there. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Installer beta2 working on an OldWorld PowerMac-6500/225
Thanks! Sven, I've subscribed to the debian-boot list so I can listen in to the discussion. (Who know? Maybe even participate a bit!) BootX compatibility is fairly important to me because I've got some really old hardware with fairly broken Open Firmware. (PowerMac 6500, and Beige G3). Quik *can* be made to work on this hardware, but if anything goes wrong it's a long and arduous process getting the OF settings back to a working condition. Also, I need to be able to dual-boot Debian and MacOS9. As I understand your reply: Soon (Monday is the first time I'll be able to play again... Is that too soon?) I should be able to download a new iso from the daily build area that will allow me to tell it to skip the boot-loader installation part and get on with things. (I'll have to simulate [manually using BootX] the normal functions of a boot loader...) this will get me un-stuck and allow me to move on to the next phase of the installation. Will it be obvious how to tell it to skip the boot-loader install? Or do I need some special magic? Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help! Thanks, Rick Sven Luther wrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 02:15:20AM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote: 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...) Cool. ... snip . 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. This will be solved in the next d-i uploads. I have uploaded yesterday a nobootloader package, which enable you to work without any bootloader, but ultimately, a quik-installer would be needed. Maybe Jeremie is already working on that ? Also, this means that it is possible to boot with bootx on oldworld, and that the default -powerpc-small that was selected in kernel-installer is probably not the right solution. A kernel to use kind of question might be welcome, and maybe there could also be some kind of auto-probing for which kernel was booted. BTW, these kind of things have more their place on the debian-boot mailing list, so i forward this there. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Installer beta2 working on an OldWorld PowerMac-6500/225
Hello Rick, I'm trying to get debian-installer working well on OldWorld systems. In order to achieve this, we need to : - have miBoot in Debian (for the boot floppy), - have a quik-installer udeb, as well as an openfirmware-configurator one, - it seems a miboot/bootx-installer package would be useful, too. I've been a bit short of time lately, so i've not progressed much about these things. On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 05:25:20PM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote: Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help! There is :-) As you probably know, miBoot is distributed along with BootX, in a stuffit expander package. I haven't got any MacOS anywhere, so it'd be cool if you could : - Turn BootX's stuffit archive (see http://penguinppc.org/~benh/) into a tar.gz containing MacBinary files, - Comaintain the package with me, especially the bootx part, as I won't be able to use/test BootX at all, so I can't do it myself. Of course your help would be welcome on any of the above items, too. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to work on, so we can coordinate our efforts. -- Jeremie Koenig [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
