What is the URL for the latest Debian installer iso for a powerpc (32-bit, G4) macintosh?

Is there anything I need to do (e.g. manually add a few lines to sources.list after/during the install) other than the the normal installation process (i.e. same as I would use for an amd64 machine)?

Is there anything in particular you would like me to report on after I'm done with the installation?

Thanks for all your hard work!

Rick

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Am Dienstag, dem 14.12.2021 um 17:12 -0800 schrieb Rick Thomas:

What is the URL for the latest Debian installer iso for a powerpc
(32-bit, G4) macintosh?

Is there anything I need to do (e.g. manually add a few lines to
sources.list after/during the install) other than the the normal
installation process (i.e. same as I would use for an amd64 machine)?

Is there anything in particular you would like me to report on after
I'm done with the installation?

Thanks for all your hard work!

Rick

Hi Rick,

you may find the last snapshot of the PowerPC ports image here: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2021-10-20/

As far as I know you should be able to just run and install it. See my
note over here on how to boot from an USB stick. I don't know if a G4
will be able to do that as well: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2021/01/msg00035.html

Otherwise just burn a CD.

If you encounter any issues just tell here. Adrian is doing all the
hard work of making the port work (thanks again!). It seems there is
not much manpower left for updating the documentation at the ports
site. I don't even know how this works in this Debian universe… (if
it's kinda straight forward I may try to update some information at
some point…)

Good luck and happy hacking
Johannes

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Hi,

On Wed, 2021-12-15 at 09:53:16 +0100, Johannes Brakensiek wrote:

Am Dienstag, dem 14.12.2021 um 17:12 -0800 schrieb Rick Thomas:

What is the URL for the latest Debian installer iso for a powerpc
(32-bit, G4) macintosh?

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2021-10-20/

As far as I know you should be able to just run and install it. See my
note over here on how to boot from an USB stick. I don't know if a G4
will be able to do that as well: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2021/01/msg00035.html

That's for G5, not G4?

Otherwise just burn a CD.

Yet another one...

If you encounter any issues just tell here. Adrian is doing all the
hard work of making the port work (thanks again!). It seems there is
not much manpower left for updating the documentation at the ports
site. I don't even know how this works in this Debian universe… (if
it's kinda straight forward I may try to update some information at
some point…)

I've followed this path for my Powerbook G4, and while installation
from CD went surprisingly fine, I eventually got an error from the
GRUB installer - which claimed not to be able to find /dev/sda3 :(
I did a "chroot /target" and was able to "hexdump -C /dev/sda3",
to prove that the disk wassn't stolen halfway through the install
process...
What might be missing?

Another thought: Since the PBG4 cannot boot from USB (can it?),
what about having a first-stage bootloader on CD that makes USB
key drives available as a second stage? (Is this possible at all?)
My stack of empty CDs is melting. Could I use CD-RWs?

Thanks,
Steffen

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On Wed, Dec 15, 2021, at 12:53 AM, Johannes Brakensiek wrote:

Am Dienstag, dem 14.12.2021 um 17:12 -0800 schrieb Rick Thomas:

What is the URL for the latest Debian installer iso for a powerpc
(32-bit, G4) macintosh?

Is there anything I need to do (e.g. manually add a few lines to
sources.list after/during the install) other than the the normal
installation process (i.e. same as I would use for an amd64 machine)?

Is there anything in particular you would like me to report on after
I'm done with the installation?

Thanks for all your hard work!

Rick

Hi Rick,

you may find the last snapshot of the PowerPC ports image here: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2021-10-20/

As far as I know you should be able to just run and install it. See my
note over here on how to boot from an USB stick. I don't know if a G4
will be able to do that as well: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2021/01/msg00035.html

Otherwise just burn a CD.

The powermac G4s can't boot from USB, so I'll just burn a CD. (Or a CD-RW if I can...)

If you encounter any issues just tell here. Adrian is doing all the
hard work of making the port work (thanks again!). It seems there is
not much manpower left for updating the documentation at the ports
site. I don't even know how this works in this Debian universe… (if
it's kinda straight forward I may try to update some information at
some point…)

That would be a great service to the community! If you decide to do that and need some help, please feel free to ask me!

Good luck and happy hacking
Johannes

And for you the same!
Rick

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Am Mittwoch, dem 15.12.2021 um 16:32 +0100 schrieb Steffen Grunewald:

I've followed this path for my Powerbook G4, and while installation

from CD went surprisingly fine, I eventually got an error from the

GRUB installer - which claimed not to be able to find /dev/sda3 :(

I did a "chroot /target" and was able to "hexdump -C /dev/sda3",

to prove that the disk wassn't stolen halfway through the install

process...

What might be missing?

I did not encounter that one yet. Would have to try at my G4 after
christmas. Are there any experience from the others?

Johannes

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Installation report follows at end.

On Wed, Dec 15, 2021, at 12:53 AM, Johannes Brakensiek wrote:

Am Dienstag, dem 14.12.2021 um 17:12 -0800 schrieb Rick Thomas:

What is the URL for the latest Debian installer iso for a powerpc
(32-bit, G4) macintosh?

Is there anything I need to do (e.g. manually add a few lines to
sources.list after/during the install) other than the the normal
installation process (i.e. same as I would use for an amd64 machine)?

Is there anything in particular you would like me to report on after
I'm done with the installation?

Thanks for all your hard work!

Rick

Hi Rick,

you may find the last snapshot of the PowerPC ports image here: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2021-10-20/

As far as I know you should be able to just run and install it. See my
note over here on how to boot from an USB stick. I don't know if a G4
will be able to do that as well: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2021/01/msg00035.html

Otherwise just burn a CD.

If you encounter any issues just tell here. Adrian is doing all the
hard work of making the port work (thanks again!). It seems there is
not much manpower left for updating the documentation at the ports
site. I don't even know how this works in this Debian universe… (if
it's kinda straight forward I may try to update some information at
some point…)

Good luck and happy hacking
Johannes

So... I downloaded the "powerpc" netinst iso from ports/snapshots/2021-10-20/ and burned it to a CD-R (the CD-RW's I had on the shelf were so old they couldn't be recognized in the burner) It booted fine and I chose to do the default non-graphical
install in non-expert mode. I accepted all the default options up to partitioning disks, where I chose "guided -- use entire disk" with "Separate /home partition" this resulted in a partition scheme with a hfs partition mounted on /boot/EFI but no /
boot partition per se. I assume this means that /boot should be included in the root partition and that the new Grub would be able to find it, and the kernel/initramfs contained therein. So I accepted that scheme and allowed it to proceed.

When it got to "Install the GRUB boot loader" it failed with this message:
Unable to install Grub in /dev/sda3
Executing "grub-install /dev/sda3" failed
This is a fatal error

I called it to continue without installing grub and when it rebooted, it gave me the grub menu, but was unable to load the kernel and initramfs.

Did I do something wrong?

Next step is to boot from the CD into "rescue" mode so I can get the installation log files and post them here.

Thanks for any help you can give!

Rick

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Hello Rick!

On 12/18/21 03:53, Rick Thomas wrote:

So... I downloaded the "powerpc" netinst iso from ports/snapshots/2021-10-20/ and
burned it to a CD-R (the CD-RW's I had on the shelf were so old they couldn't be recognized in the burner)

Why didn't you use any of the snapshots that you previously used and that are known
to work? You keep repeating this mistake. Until all of the changes that I have made
have been properly merged into all parts of Debian - which is a long and tedious
process - you should not be using random ISO images but only those which are known
to work.

Search through your inbox and look for the one where you know the installation works.

It booted fine and I chose to do the default non-graphical install in non-expert mode.
I accepted all the default options up to partitioning disks, where I chose "guided --
use entire disk" with "Separate /home partition" this resulted in a partition scheme
with a hfs partition mounted on /boot/EFI but no /boot partition per se.

The path "/boot/EFI" is already a pointer that this particular ISO image is missing
the partman-hfs module and you should have just stopped here. The proper path here
is /boot/grub and it must be formatted as HFS.

Use a different, known to work image.

Adrian

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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Am Samstag, dem 18.12.2021 um 09:19 +0100 schrieb John Paul Adrian
Glaubitz:

Use a different, known to work image.

Sorry, that's my bad. Did not know only certain images are supposed to
work.

Johannes

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On Sat, Dec 18, 2021, at 12:19 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Hello Rick!
...
Why didn't you use any of the snapshots that you previously used and
that are known to work?

...

Use a different, known to work image.

OK, on Adrian's advice I used the NETINST iso from October 6, 2021, which I had successfully used on a mac-mini-G4 previously. In short, it worked. But the long story is more interesting:

The CD booted fine. I chose the text-mode default installer.

I accepted all the defaults until it came to time to partition the disk.

I chose "guided - create LVM - use entire disk" for the partition scheme.
All went as expected until it came time to write the partition tables to disk. At that point it complained about not having a /boot partition. I remembered hearing somewhere that a separate /boot partition was not strictly necessary as long as there
was a /boot/grub partition that the firmware could access, because modern grub programs were able to find stuff from /boot even if it was buried in the root partition and the root partition was itself buried in an LVM partition. I verified that there
was indeed a /boot/grub partition of type hfs in the proposed scheme. So I told it to ignore this problem and continue the installation without a /boot partition.

It went ahead and created a /boot directory in the root partition, and put the kernel/initramfs and stuff there.

A bit later it complained "Your boot partition is not located on the first primary partition of your hard disk ... Go back to the menu and correct the problem?" I remembered Adrian saying that we should ignore this, so I answered "no"

It went ahead with configuring the package manager and installing Grub, all of which occurred without incident. I accepted all the default answers.

It finished up and rebooted into the installed system without problem.

Discussion:
If it's true that modern grub can dig into an LVM containing root containing /boot, why is there any reason to want a separate /boot partition at all? Is this a feature that only applies to grub for powerpc? I really like the feature of having /boot be
a directory in root, because it allows me to update kernels without first checking that there's enough space in the /boot partition for another kernel and initrd. I'd like to see it be at least an option, and (IMHO) preferably the default on all
installs.

This particular powermac-G4 is reserved for testing, so I'm happy to rest anything new from Adrian's workshop!

Thanks for all the hard work,
Rick

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Hello!

On 12/19/21 19:54, Johannes Brakensiek wrote:

Sorry, that's my bad. Did not know only certain images are supposed to
work.

In order to avoid this confusion in the future, let me briefly explain the situation.

Both debian-installer, i.e. the application installing Debian, and the installation
images are assembled from a large number of individual packages.

In order to support a new platform, one needs to add support for this platform to
a number of different packages, both in debian-installer and d-i packages as well
as a number of other packages.

For debian-installer to work with PowerMacs, quite a number of changes were necessary
due to the complicated boot mechanism that these machines use. The packages that needed
to be changed or created, are:

- grub-installer
- partman-hfs (new package)
- grub2
- debian-cd
- debian-installer
- hfsprogs

While the changes in debian-installer, grub2 and debian-cd have been implemented for a long
time, the changes to grub-installer, hfsprogs and the new package partman-hfs were long
incomplete and I often just used crude hacks to get the installation working. None of these
crude hacks were naturally ever committed to the source code meaning that only a certain number
of installation images that included these hacks were more or less working. I eventually started
working on making the necessary changes to grub-installer and hfsprogs in a proper way and adding
a new proper partman-hfs package.

First of all, hfsprogs was unmaintained in Debian for a long time and due the way the package
is maintained upstream by Apple - as part of a large source code dump - it was rather challenging
to get hfsprogs updated to a newer upstream version. The source cannot be built as is on Linux but
needs customization. Furthermore, Apple quietly removed support for legacy HFS which I had to restore
as well when updating the package.

Then I worked on grub-installer to get support added for GRUB installation on PowerMacs using hfsprogs
and partman-hfs. I took me around three days with lots of testing and trial and error until I got the
changes right that needed to be made for grub-installer. A quite long and nerve-wrecking process given
the fact that you need to re-install Debian several times a day on a machine with a 1 GHz CPU. After
I got it all ironed out, I committed the changes to grub-installer.

Then hfsprogs needed to be changed again to add a hfsprogs-udeb package so that mkhfs and mkhfsplus were
available inside debian-installer. The changes did not take long to implement, but the package was stuck
in the Debian FTP NEW queue for almost a year. So, again for this change to be used, I had to resort to
temporary hacks. This is further complicated by the fact that hfsprogs uses the APSL license which Debian
currently considers to be non-free meaning that hfsprogs had to be moved to the "non-free" section which
Debian Ports currently does not support.

Last but not least, the partman-hfs udeb package is currently not part of the official Debian distribution
as I have not continued with the work while the updated hfsprogs package was still in the NEW queue. I
wasn't sure whether hfsprogs would still be accepted after such a long time, so I decided to rather wait
with partman-hfs.

The current situation is now that partman-hfs needs to be worked on next and Debian Ports needs to get
support for the "contrib" and "non-free" distributions. The former is relatively easy and since I already
have a rough draft package, it won't take me too long to get a proper partman-hfs package ready.

However, getting support for "contrib" and "non-free" added to Debian Ports is not trivial and also outside
my influence. I have been told by the Debian Ports FTP admins that there has been done some work to get
this implemented, but I have unfortunately no time estimate when this will have been finally implemented.

Until that has happened, please stick to the images that are known to work or wait until I release new
images with the missing temporary hacks implemented and which I am declaring as "supposed to work" or
"known to work". FWIW, since I also create images for other architectures, I'm trying to create new
images regularly. But I cannot always take care of the manual changes required for Apple PowerMac
which is why even newer images might not work.

Adrian

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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Hello!

On 12/27/21 03:20, Rick Thomas wrote:

If it's true that modern grub can dig into an LVM containing root containing /boot, why is there any reason to want a separate /boot partition at all?
Is this a feature that only applies to grub for powerpc? I really like the feature of having /boot be a directory in root, because it allows me to update
kernels without first checking that there's enough space in the /boot partition
for another kernel and initrd. I'd like to see it be at least an option, and (IMHO) preferably the default on all installs.

This error message might come from the partman-hfs package which currently is quickly
hacked to together and naturally not all the checks that are being performed are
necessarily returning the correct error messages. See my other mail that I posted
into this thread earlier today which explains the technical background.

In particular, I have never tested LVM and I therefore don't really know whether the
partman-hfs checks for an LVM setup are correct and the error messages make sense. Feel
free to perform such tests with images that are otherwise known to work and collect
the data.

If you really want to help me, I suggest that you perform systematic tests with said
image and collect the results and summarize expected behavior and actual behavior
of the software. Also, please always save the log file so that we can quickly localize
the package in question that is responsible for the warning or error message.

The more accurate your tests results are, the easier it is for me to localize the bugs
and fix them. So, installation tests are indeed always welcome if they come with usable
test results.

FWIW, here is the source code for such tests by the partman-ext3 package [1]. Maybe that
helps understanding the underlying mechanism.

Thanks,
Adrian

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/partman-ext3/-/tree/master/check.d

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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Hello Adrian,

Am Montag, dem 27.12.2021 um 11:42 +0100 schrieb John Paul Adrian
Glaubitz:

Until that has happened, please stick to the images that are known to
work or wait until I release new
images with the missing temporary hacks implemented and which I am
declaring as "supposed to work" or
"known to work". FWIW, since I also create images for other
architectures, I'm trying to create new
images regularly. But I cannot always take care of the manual changes required for Apple PowerMac
which is why even newer images might not work.

thank you very much - for both: Your in-deep explanation and the even
way more extensive work on supporting the PowerPC platform!

Currently I can't be much help on this other than testing some odds and
ends at some point (still need to learn how to do proper Debian
packaging). But if you point me to any entry point to learn how to
update the web documentation of the PPC port I may try to update those
pages using the information you provide (e.g. link the latest daily
install image known to work).

Thanks again
Johannes

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On Mon, Dec 27, 2021, at 2:56 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

If you really want to help me, I suggest that you perform systematic tests with said
image and collect the results and summarize expected behavior and actual behavior
of the software. Also, please always save the log file so that we can quickly localize
the package in question that is responsible for the warning or error message.

The more accurate your tests results are, the easier it is for me to localize the bugs
and fix them. So, installation tests are indeed always welcome if they come with usable
test results.

OK, you're on! Please give me a list of the ISO images you'd like tested and what kinds
of tests you want me to run.

For example, I've recently tested the 2021-10-06 image with the LVM partition scheme,
and given you a report on what I saw. Is that sufficient for that ISO/partition combination?
Or is there some information missing that you'd like to have me add?

Thanks for the opportunity to help!
Enjoy!
Rick

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Hello!

On 12/27/21 11:42, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Last but not least, the partman-hfs udeb package is currently not part of the official Debian distribution
as I have not continued with the work while the updated hfsprogs package was still in the NEW queue. I
wasn't sure whether hfsprogs would still be accepted after such a long time, so I decided to rather wait
with partman-hfs.

The current situation is now that partman-hfs needs to be worked on next and Debian Ports needs to get
support for the "contrib" and "non-free" distributions. The former is relatively easy and since I already
have a rough draft package, it won't take me too long to get a proper partman-hfs package ready.

Finally an update on this. I took the time today to finalize the partman-hfs package and I expect it to
upload it to Debian unstable within the next days. I'm just waiting for some comments from one of the
other maintainers of debian-installers. Once I have received those, I will upload the package.

I have also fixed the problem with the bogus error message now during partitioning and the whole partitioning
works as expected now. You can download a preliminary test ISO installation image for PowerPC from here [1].

Adrian

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/tests/hfstest-20220323/

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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Hello Dan!

On 3/24/22 07:36, Dan Whitehouse wrote:

Unfortunately this still appears to fail for me, at least in qemu.
I do get an hfs partition during the partitioning stage, but grub fails installing to /dev/sda2.
Interestingly I don’t get to select the partition.

This is an emulation issue with QEMU. If I remember correctly, QEMU does
not properly handle NVRAM emulation which is required to configure the bootloader [1]. You would have to skip this part.

Adrian

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/grub-installer/-/blob/master/grub-installer#L968

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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Unfortunately this still appears to fail for me, at least in qemu.
I do get an hfs partition during the partitioning stage, but grub fails installing to /dev/sda2.
Interestingly I don’t get to select the partition.

On 23 Mar 2022, at 13:44, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hello!

On 12/27/21 11:42, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Last but not least, the partman-hfs udeb package is currently not part of the official Debian distribution
as I have not continued with the work while the updated hfsprogs package was still in the NEW queue. I
wasn't sure whether hfsprogs would still be accepted after such a long time, so I decided to rather wait
with partman-hfs.

The current situation is now that partman-hfs needs to be worked on next and Debian Ports needs to get
support for the "contrib" and "non-free" distributions. The former is relatively easy and since I already
have a rough draft package, it won't take me too long to get a proper partman-hfs package ready.

Finally an update on this. I took the time today to finalize the partman-hfs package and I expect it to
upload it to Debian unstable within the next days. I'm just waiting for some comments from one of the
other maintainers of debian-installers. Once I have received those, I will upload the package.

I have also fixed the problem with the bogus error message now during partitioning and the whole partitioning
works as expected now. You can download a preliminary test ISO installation image for PowerPC from here [1].

Adrian

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/tests/hfstest-20220323/

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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