I don't have another Mac, so I might try painstakingly downloading and burning every possible image of Debian to see if any of them works.
Try restoring the image to a local partition on the machine, and boot from that.
I don't have another Mac, so I might try painstakingly downloading and burning every possible image of Debian to see if any of them works.
I solved it! The last time I entered Open Firmware, I realized that the date was set to the 1970s, probably because the date resets itself after removing the battery. I thought that maybe this was what was causing the problem, so I set the actual date and time (https://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060814075952448) and now... It boots just fine.Try restoring the image to a local partition on the machine, and boot from that.
I wonder why they didn't.
What is wrong is plain old leopard? It seems to me that the problem is lack of developer interest for this aging platform, rather than lack of Snow Leopard availability for PPC. Take a look at the enthusiast development for Windows XP (which is an 18 year old operating system, mind you) compared to the enthusiast development for Leopard and Tiger (which are objectively better operating systems). Windows XP, a nearly 2 decade old operating system, is far more usable for day to day tasks than either of those 2 operating systems are. Hell, it even has 4 actively developed, fully functional web browsers.I wonder why they didn't do a lot of things.
Like giving Snow Leopard to the G5 so we wouldn't have to screw with Linux...
What is wrong is plain old leopard? It seems to me that the problem is lack of developer interest for this aging platform, rather than lack of Snow Leopard availability for PPC.
I've all but given up on PPC Linux. Never in my life have I encountered a bigger time sink. I have wintel boxes I can install ubuntu on in 15 minutes, and everything works out of the box. No fiddling around necessary.
I believe these PowerPC machines are best paired with the operating systems that were designed specifically for them. It's nice that BSD/Linux will "work", but the experience, in comparison, is half baked at best.
Of course, I do appreciate the few people who have put time, and effort into PowerPC Linux. They have come an awfully long way, especially considering the challenges they face, and what they've had to work with. The problem lies in the fact that there aren't ENOUGH developers interested, to take the it over the top. I don't mean to sound ungrateful at all.That aside, I think it's very important to give proper credit and applaud to the people behind Linux for PowerPC, who have and continue to devote their free time and energy to development for a platform that's been long since abandoned, which is a far cry in principle and practice to Apple's teams previously numbering in the hundreds.
Though for what it's worth, my G5 and DLSD are very much enjoying their time on Tiger, which I believe was Apple's operating system peak.
I only now realized that the instructions here for booting into the install USB have been rendered invalid with the advent of GRUB-enabled installation images, thus making this guide invalid for probably most of May. So, the download link has been fixed to point to the 4-20 images, and not only that, the mirror install process has been greatly simplified.
GRUB installation worked on a G5, though has not been tested on a G4. If it fails, we'll have to put the manual process back up. I'm just hoping it will be nice, and play ball with at least most machines...
Hi swamprock and all! Thank you so much for this topic, it made me creating an account. I am a PowerPC fan for so long ... and a Linux user too.
I want to install Debian on a MacMini but it failed with an ISO downloaded earlier this month. After I added the apt repositories, I had error about NO_PUBKEY errors and no gpg tool installed.
I then tried yesterday (still using an USB key) with the latest ISO and on the boot command in OpenFirmware I always had errors about MAC partition, like:
MAC-PARTS: specified MAC partition is not valid can't OPEN usb1/disk@1:2,\\yaboot
Has anyone succeeded in installing Debian on a MacMini? Or got the same errors?
z970mp: Thank you very much! I tried today and the installation worked well ... until I choose "continue" after the failure of the GRUB installation. Reading again the topic, I understand that I have to follow part of the old procedure. I will retry a full installation as soon as possible.
z970mp: I tried at least 6 times to reinstall these last days with no success. I followed step 6a. I get no error but each time after a reboot, it does not start yaboot (staying on the display of the Mac folder smiling). The HFS partition does not seem to be recognized. Note that when I retry an installation, at the partitionning step, the disk is always shown with a single HFS partition of the disk size, in my case 60 GB.
I tried on a MacMini at 1.3 GHz (PowerMac 10,2), with different settings: a smaller (800 KB or 1 MB) HFS partition, an ext2 partition for /boot, a single Linux partition in ext3, ...
I really wanted to install a clean and recent Debian but I consumed more time than I had.
Yeah, you need to be a real masochist to mess with linux on PowerPC. Fortunately, I fall into that category and have had a measure of success on various machines, ranging from iBook G3 to DC G5. Of all my machines, only my Sawtooth with a Radeon 9000 and my DP 2.0ghz G5 (no idea why it's so damn choppy, even after I thought it was fixed with a new keyboard- don't ask) were failures. My 667mhz TiBook had to have its screen resolution put into yaboot.conf to avoid psychedelia, but works well otherwise.
Yes, it's a huge time sink, but if you *have* the time, that sink will shrink as you learn more. I can get a fully-functioning PPC linux box/notebook up and running with a desktop environment, web browser, email, wifi, accelerated graphics, video (360p-720p, depending on the machine) and useful apps in about an hour now.
But that's just me. I like to tinker and love the challenge. It's not for everyone, and totally understandable as it can be extremely frustrating at times.
I'm going to take a short break from all of this to work on my new toy- a 1973 TV Ping Pong arcade machine. TTL logic and linear power supply goodness, with a black and white TV instead of a monitor, no less!
I wonder if linux would run on that...
(Posted from my TiBook 1.0ghz running sid)
How did I miss this post , WOW , I also love old arcades , have a crush for pinballs , do you have to restore it from a not working condition ?