Question on installing Debian ppc on iBook with small HD

[Fritz Hudnut]

CC-ing you at your suse email and hopefully on the powerpc list-serve??

Hi Fritz!
We should probably move the discussion over to debian-powerpc [1].
The partitioning scheme was changed to accommodate the switch from Yaboot
to GRUB as the
default bootloader.

If running "custom" with the "/" "/home" and "swap" partitions pointed

to, would that not work??
It would still work. All you need is an HFS partition mounted to
/boot/grub.

So, I got into the Net installer on an '04 iBook with 40GB HD, I have
approx 11 GB set for what is right now Lubuntu 16.04, which is booting from
Yaboot in the HFS partition sda2, but that partition showed as 10MB, using
323KB for OSX and yaboot. When I was using the custom installer and went
to that partition there was no option for "/boot" of any kind?? I thought
that was because the partition is too small for grub?? which these days
seems to need more space?? Like 200 MB or more??

Or, can I get the installer to use that HFS partition and finish out the
install using it? OR, do I need to carve out another HFS formatted
partition from the 10.4 GB of space in which I now have / and /home
together, AND then run the installer? And, then, what would be the minimum
space needed for grub to work?

F

I haven't taken the time to check the Debian site . . . but today is

Bookworm day in my

daily desktop driver . . . so I'm close.

Yes, indeed.
Adrian

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Fritz!

Apologies for the late reply!

So, I got into the Net installer on an '04 iBook with 40GB HD, I have approx 11 GB
set for what is right now Lubuntu 16.04, which is booting from Yaboot in the HFS
partition sda2, but that partition showed as 10MB, using 323KB for OSX and yaboot.
When I was using the custom installer and went to that partition there was no option
for "/boot" of any kind??

Old installation images which installed Yaboot as a bootloader used a different way
to create an HFS partition. This partition was not mounted by default in Linux since
Yaboot normally didn't have to write any files ot the HFS partition after installation
unlike GRUB.

I thought that was because the partition is too small for grub??  which these days
seems to need more space??  Like 200 MB or more?
https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/partman-auto/-/blob/master/recipes-powerpc-powermac_newworld/atomic
Or, can I get the installer to use that HFS partition and finish out the install using it?

It's most likely too small.

OR, do I need to carve out another HFS formatted partition from the 10.4 GB of space in
which I now have / and /home together, AND then run the installer?  And, then, what would
be the minimum space needed for grub to work?

I would recommend a fresh installation and let the partioning tool handling the partition
sizes.

Adrian

[Fritz Hudnut]

Post by John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
I would recommend a fresh installation and let the partioning tool handling the partition
sizes.
Adrian

Thanks for the reply, it's been so long that I ran an installation that
way, I'm usually installing "custom" into drives that are sliced and diced
to contain a number of systems . . . .

I used to run installs "install alongside OSX" back in the day . . . I
can't recall if the Debian installer offered me that option recently when I
ran into the process a fair ways before aborting out of it . . . ??? I
still want to preserve the OSX install on ye olden iBook . . . . Right now
it's the third laptop down in the stack of laptops, in descending order of
age . . . oldest on the bottom, and so forth. : - )

F

[Fritz Hudnut]

Adrian:

Just providing feedback on the Debian Sid/PPC install that I ran a couple
months back and then today did an apt dist-upgrade that brought in 489
packages. Because the machine has a 933 MHz cpu it doesn't do anything too
fast, but it did get through the installation of 432MB of data in about an
hour, but there were some errors . . . . I guess it installed the 6.5
kernel, but then did not dpkg it for use, then it showed that 6.3 kernel is
"to be removed" but numerous attempts to remove it have failed . . . . I
forgot to check uname -a??? for running kernel. Problems with grubieee1275
also, although a grub window opens and boots the system OK . . . . And
then an issue with linux-image-powerpc as well have the dist-upgrade error
out.

I was hoping that I could use the machine as a distributed.net "mule" to
just slowly kick out some stats, for hours and see how that would work.

But the provided "web browser" is that epiphany?? launches briefly and then
crashes. Tried that a couple times. I tried to install "firefox" via
console and that had so many unmet dependencies that failed, and same for
"chromium" . . . no candidate.

I ran "apt-get -f install" which in the olden day of PPC would clean up a
problem install, that errored out as well.

So, there is a GUI, but somewhere in there the kernel got botched up?? or
the machine can't support 6.5?? and won't remove 6.3 . . . the machine is
very slow in spec, not sure if I could wget the right distributed.net "ppc"
package and install it via console . . . . Ran out of time to mess with
it, the lack of a browser kind of cuts down on usefulness, but had that
problem with the OSX 10.4 install that was on there and the possibly
Lubuntu 16.04??? browsers were almost dysfunctional . . . I think it has
946 MB RAM??? Don't think it has enough kick to run your SidsterPPC
system??

F

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/