On 24/07/15 12:24 PM, Nathaniel Nelson wrote:
Hello! I hope this is the proper way to seek Debian support, and that
I'm not making a mistake/emailing the wrong list/whatever.
I've never used Debian before, and I'm trying to install it on an old
Mac Mini with a PowerPC G4 processor. I downloaded the PowerPC iso
file (debian-8.1.0-powerpc-netinst.iso) and burned it to an empty CD.
I was able to successfully navigate the installation process. A couple
points of interest:
* I chose to use the entire available hard drive space and set up LVM
(unencrypted). So I wiped Mac OS and all my old files from the computer.
* I chose to use a single partition (the recommended/default choice)
and after writing partition changes to the hard drive I received a
warning that Yaboot would need its own partition. It asked if I wanted
to return to the menu, so I did, assuming I would be able to make this
change after reversing the changes (as there was a menu option to do
so). However the "reverse changes" button seemed to do nothing, and I
couldn't return to an earlier step to specify different partition
settings, so I simply continued and wrote the changes again. (Probably
should have read the manual before starting... sorry)
I'm not sure what size the HD is but I'm assuming it's small by today's
standards. Fortunately yaboot doesn't seem to need much space. From a
google search I came up with:
# type name length base (
size ) system
/dev/sda1 Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1 (
31.5k) Partition map
/dev/sda2 Apple_Bootstrap bootstrap 1600 @ 64
(800.0k) NewWorld bootblock
/dev/sda3 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 myLinux 85852160 @ 1664 (
40.9G) Linux native
/dev/sda4 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap 8000820 @ 202238668 (
3.8G) Linux swap
* At the end I was prompted to choose a partition for installing
Yaboot. Although I had chosen to create only one partition, it offered
me two choices: sda2 and sba1 (IIRC). Not knowing the difference I
chose sda2, the first one from the list, and installation completed
and the computer began to boot in Debian.
The yaboot boot log displays, with a notable error flashing by that I
paraphrase here:
[FAILED] Failed to load Linux Kernel Modules
Probably couldn't install past yaboot due to insufficient space. It
looks like Apple uses a partition (sda1) for its partition map, so sda2
should only be large enough to hold yaboot and you should install to sda3.
Swap partitions are optional. You can always create a swap file later
instead of a partition. This is easier to resize than a swap partition.
No other failures appear in the log. After everything finishes and the
screen goes black, instead of a login screen, I get this message
fullscreen:
"Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the
system can't recover. Please log out and try again."
First I assumed this was due to a mistake when I chose to install
Yaboot in sda2, so I ran a full installation again from the CD.
Everything went the same, however there was no prompt to choose a
partition and pick sba1 instead. And after the install finished, I got
the same error message.
Googling, I read that I could open a terminal from this error window
with Ctrl+Alt+F1. This works, and then I read that I should log in as
root and run the command startx. And that the error should be fixed by
installing x-window-system if the startx command isn't found.
However, the startx command *is* found, xorg is already installed, and
when it runs, this again triggers the fullscreen "Oh no!" warning.
I read that the installer isn't meant to install on top of another
full installation, and that most problems such as this can be fixed
without a full reinstall, so I haven't made a third attempt at
reinstallation. What else could potentially be the issue here?
The potential issue is that the system could have conflicting settings.
If you have separate / and /home partitions, you can always reformat /
and keep your current /home. With smaller drives however you can run out
of space in one or the other fairly easily.
My advice is not to worry about it. If your drive is only 50G or so,
don't use a separate /home partition. If you've got 100G or more, then
create a / with about 20G - 30G and leave the rest for /home.
Thanks for any help. I can also supply more logs if you direct me to
which ones might be helpful.
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