Problems with Sarge on OldWorld 604e PowerMac: booting, quik, 2.6 kernel, etc.

• Previous message: Wim De Smet: "(no subject)"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 17:23:57 -0400
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

Hi List-

I'm having some difficulty with this combination.

I'd like to use quik to boot this OldWorld 7300 PowerMac (604e) directly
from the HDD (without any MacOS tools) into a 2.6 kernel. It seems that
Debian is the only distribution that makes this practical to do without
doing all sorts of stuff from scratch.

I can install Woody by first booting from a bootable floppy image
available on the mirrors and then using a root.bin floppy image at the
same location:

/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/3.0.23-2002-05-21/powermac/images-1.44
[ ] boot-floppy-hfs.img 16-May-2002 11:22 1.4M
[ ] root.bin 16-May-2002 11:21 1.4M

Woody installs and runs fine, but I've got very old software. I'd like
to use relatively current versions of kerberos and openafs available in
Sarge, so I upgraded following the instructions in the Release Notes for
Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (`sarge'), PowerPC Chapter 4 - Upgrades from
previous releases at
http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/powerpc/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

Though there were some hiccups, I got them worked out and managed the
upgrade to Sarge without further problems.

The problems arise when I want to install a 2.6 kernel.

I've tried many things now, but ultimately, I end up making the box
unbootable from the HDD. I can boot from that bootable floppy above,
mount the root fs, then chroot into it and make modifications to the
Sarge installation, but cannot figure out how to get quik to boot the
2.6 kernel, or for that matter, how to make a bootable floppy that will
use /dev/sda2 as the root fs instead of /dev/fd0.

I found the knl package, but the knl binary insists that every kernel
image I have is not a kernel image (including the 2.2 kernel that ships
with Woody, the 2.6.8 kernel image I installed from aptitude, as well as
the kernel on the bootable floppy: zImage---even after I gunzip it), so
adjusting the root fs and swap dev for the kernel image is something
that I cannot seem to do.

When I install the 2.6.8 kernel from aptitude (yes, the correct one for
my arch) and edit quik.conf to use it instead of the 2.2 kernel shipped
with Woody (which boots fine), I can no longer boot from the HDD. The
closest I can get is a weirdly colored penguin logo (sometimes red,
sometimes blue, sometimes green, etc.)

Furthermore, even though I can boot from the floppy and chroot into the
HDD root fs and thus edit quik.conf again (restoring it to its original
state), I still cannot boot from the HDD (yes, I did run quik after
revising the quik.conf file in each case; I even used the installer
program on the root.bin image to run quik after making the revisions in
a console and thereby noticed that it was running quik -v -f -r /target,
but still to no avail; back in the console, I tried quik -v -r -f /
while chrooted into /target and still no joy; part of the problem with
doing it through the install program was that after upgrading to Sarge,
the upgraded quik package relies on a glibc version that the root.bin
image doesn't have, so I chrooted into /target, removed quik, adjusted
my sources.list file to return to stable, then updated and installed
quik again, thus restoring quik to the same one originally installed I
think), but still no success.

Am I doing something wrong with quik here? I've read that it can be
incredibly difficult to install right (though doing it with the Woody
install program was easy enough) and that the OpenFirmware in these
machines is very buggy. Is it possible for me to netboot one of these
machines with bootp and/or tftp and stuff? Maybe that's a better
solution than struggling with quik.

I've tried installing Sarge right off the bat, but I don't find any
bootable floppy images for booting and installing Sarge on an OldWorld
PPC. The CD images are there, but I've read that these machines cannot
boot linux from the CD. The floppy images I find in
/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-powerpc/20050305/images/powerpc/floppy
are not bootable. I tried both the boot.img and the ofonlyboot.img and
the 7300 ejects the disks as unbootable in each case.

It appears that the only way I can get Sarge on this machine is to
install Woody and then upgrade to Sarge which I've done 3 or 4 times
now. If that's not the case, could someone please explain the
alternatives to me? But I need a 2.6 kernel for openafs-1.3.81 in
Sarge, and every time I try to boot from one, I toast my system and end
up having to start all over. I've tried many things to avoid starting
over, but none work. Once I've tried booting with quik into a 2.6
kernel, I can no longer boot from the HDD no matter what I try (and I've
tried many things). The only way I've found it possible to recover is
to install Woody again (sigh...).

Any advice would be most welcome.

Also, is this a post more well-suited to a developer list?

TIA.

-Kevin

PS. Oh, and why is it that the Woody install program won't let me make a
rescue floppy? It claims that the capability still does not exist to
boot a PowerMac from floppy, but yet I have this bootable floppy
above...????

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

• Previous message: Wim De Smet: "(no subject)"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]