| Installing Debian on a PowerMac 7200 |
| |
| Hoping to get my GNU-Linux merit badge from the local boy scouts club, or maybe because I like driving myself crazy, I decided to install Debian on my old PowerMac 7200. Now let me preface this by saying that in 1997 I installed a version of Linux on this box before, and was intrigued enough to play with it a bit. However, I don't remember it being this much of a trail. |
| |
| Installing |
|
I don't have a CD burner on the PowerMac, so I downloaded the CD image on a PC and then used that with a boot floppy on the mac. However, you need to use this thing called Jigdo to get it. Jigdo basically is a smart FTP that downloads from multiple sources and resumes interrupted transfers quite robustly. While it worked great, just figuring out what it did and using it was a total pain in the posterior. I know I'm complaining, but come on, I'm a Mac guy, so I'm not used to having to click more than once to get something working ;-)
Anyway, once I had Jigdo I downloaded, I followed the instructions and downloaded and burned the CD image from from the Debian site. Then I took the CD to my Mac and made a boot floppy from the HFS floppy disk image on the CD, called "boot-floppy-hfs.img" (trying to do this on the PC didn't work for me, not to mention the fact that it took me two days find find a freakin' floppy disk!). Booting from the disk worked fine, and installing from the CD worked great. Just follow the manual - that became my bible. |
| |
| XFree86 |
|
Everything seemed to be going great, except that XWindows didn't work. That left me kind of miffed, as I was hoping to see how fast it ran (if it ran at all). So I kicked around config files for a few days. The dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 command became my arch nemesis, as nothing I did seemed to work! I couldn't find anyone who had advice online either. Finally I found a post on DebianHelp about something else that suggested commenting out a bunch of lines in the XFree86 config file. You can see the magic one that eventually got things working. Before I found that stuff, I went through a hell-hole of kernel reconfiguration, and kernel arguments, and PCI buses, and video drivers, and modules, oh my!
Of course, once it worked I found out that it ran slow as hell. It looked beautiful, but it just didn't want to do anything! Apparently the platinum video driver isn't hardware accelerated, and since nobody wants to use it on a PPC it probably won't ever be :-( Maybe someone with real knowledge will take pity on me while reading this and fix it... |
| |
| Conclusions |
|
It works. I know I'm complaining too much, because Linux is supposed to be for hackers. And I did triumph in the end, getting Debian installed and running fine. The way I figure it, I've got one up on Linux, so for now consider the scoreboard to be Rahul : 2 Linux : 1 I've installed it twice on this machine, both times succeeding in less than a week and without recompiling the kernel. However, the XFree86 defeated me, so Linux has 1. Until we meet again... |
| |
| :: go back to Rahul's tech notes :: |
| |