Debian Potato on oldworld powerpc

[Jason Stephenson]

I tried mailing you directly about this last night, but your MTA is 
bouncing my mail saying "Unauthorized Access." It is probably over 
paranoid and doesn't like that it can't do a reverse lookup on my hostname.

Anyway, I can't remember if the UMAX has Open Firmware, but I *think* it 
does. If it does, you should be able to install the latest PPC Linux and 
boot it without having Mac OS on the machine.

You could also try MkLinux which uses BootX (or something like that) and 
requires Mac OS to be installed. I was going to check on www.mklinux.org 
to see if the UMAX is supported, but my browser just timed out trying to 
connect. IIRC most of the clones, including the UMAX models are supported.

I've had a great deal of success with MkLinux. I've been running it on 
NuBus PowerMacs for about 6 years, now.

Bruce Dawson wrote:
> Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, I tried the old brute-force approach and
> tried booting the .img files. Actually got it to the point where it appeared to
> be loading the OS, and then it wanted to reboot from the hard drive.
> 
> I, of course, followed the instructions and let it. And, of course, it didn't
> boot. And, of course, the MacOS got wiped out in the process.
> 
> And did I mention that the installation process presented a screen that said
> "Boot floppy creation for PowerMac not yet supported" (or something to that
> effect). Which, of course, is not mentioned in the documentation.
> 
> So now I have a dead PowerMac. Sigh.
> 
> Does anyone have an idea on how to get the thing to boot? It has a weird (read:
> not like i386) partitioning scheme, and I suspect that the boot firmware is
> expecting something that's not there.
> 
> --Bruce
> 
> Quoting Ray Cote <rgacote at AppropriateSolutions.com>:
> 
>>No direct experience, but...
>>I see you have yaboot.
>>IIRC, partition your hard drive (using Mac utils) to have a fairly 
>>small Mac OS drive and the rest partitioned for Linux.
>>Install MacOS.
>>Does your CD Boot? If so, then boot it and install Linux.
>>Otherwise, see if there's a double-clickable installer available on 
>>the CD when you're running MacOS.
>>Boot system into MacOS. Copy the yaboot information over to the MacOS 
>>partition.
>>You can then boot up unto MacOS and start Linux.
>>Believe there are ways to do this with putting an alias to YABoot in 
>>the Startup Folder.
>>Been a while since I've had to do this since mostly I'm running on 
>>New World machines.
>>Ray
>>
>>-- 
>>---------------------------------------------------------
>>Raymond Cote                            Appropriate Solutions, Inc.
>>www.AppropriateSolutions.com   rgacote(at)AppropriateSolutions.com
>>603.924.6079(v)  POB 458, Peterborough, NH 03458    603.924.8668(f)
>>
> 
> 
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