With great thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz we see new test images
have landed :

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-28/

Therefore I shall jump on that right away and begin a test install
on my dual disk PowerMac G5 "quad" and I hope for wonderful things.


--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Mar 28, 2022, at 8:38 PM, Dennis Clarke <dclarke@blastwave.org> wrote:



With great thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz we see new test images
have landed :

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-28/

Therefore I shall jump on that right away and begin a test install
on my dual disk PowerMac G5 "quad" and I hope for wonderful things.

FWIW, I successfully tested those images myself on powerpc and sparc64.

Adrian

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 3/28/22 14:42, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

On Mar 28, 2022, at 8:38 PM, Dennis Clarke <dclarke@blastwave.org> wrote:



With great thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz we see new test images
have landed :

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-28/

Therefore I shall jump on that right away and begin a test install
on my dual disk PowerMac G5 "quad" and I hope for wonderful things.

FWIW, I successfully tested those images myself on powerpc and sparc64.

Oh, also I have a sparc netra standing by to test with also. However I generally need to dd if=foo.iso of=/dev/other_scsi_disk just to get
the sparc to boot the installer image. So that takes a bit of fiddling
around with disks. I may setup TFTP/Bootp and DHCP but that it even
more work just for a real network based install.

Anyways ... I'll have a look at sparc64 also today. Maybe.


--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 3/28/22 14:42, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

On Mar 28, 2022, at 8:38 PM, Dennis Clarke <dclarke@blastwave.org> wrote:



With great thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz we see new test images
have landed :

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-28/

Therefore I shall jump on that right away and begin a test install
on my dual disk PowerMac G5 "quad" and I hope for wonderful things.

FWIW, I successfully tested those images myself on powerpc and sparc64.

Adrian

Works like a charm!

I simply used the default install option from the GRUB menu that
is provided by the installer and then followed the prompts. Not sure
what you changed but this time everything just flows naturally. Should
you wish I can redo the install and capture the syslog/partman files.

There are problems, of course, but they are with Debian as a whole
and not at all specific to the ppc64 installer or the ppc64 port. I will
move onwards to sparc64 and give that a whirl on some old sparc64 netra
unit.

Also, merely a sidenote, I did the following to achieve perfection:

1) boot the installer image
2) follow some prompts to get to a shell
3) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 count=1048576
4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 count=1048576
5) power off the machine cold
6) wait 60 seconds and then boot the installer

That resulted in the partition stage simply flowing naturally along
with blank disks for sda and sdb.



--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hi!

On 3/28/22 22:58, Dennis Clarke wrote:

Works like a charm!

Good to hear!

I simply used the default install option from the GRUB menu that
is provided by the installer and then followed the prompts. Not sure
what you changed but this time everything just flows naturally. Should
you wish I can redo the install and capture the syslog/partman files.

Nah, that's fine.

If you're brave enough you can help verify that the G5 will still boot
with the "boot-device" variable in NVRAM set to NULL:

# nvram --update-config boot-device=""

There are problems, of course, but they are with Debian as a whole
and not at all specific to the ppc64 installer or the ppc64 port. I
will move onwards to sparc64 and give that a whirl on some old sparc64
netra unit.

Have fun!

FWIW, I also verified that the installation image on ia64 works fine.

Also, merely a sidenote, I did the following to achieve perfection:

1) boot the installer image
2) follow some prompts to get to a shell
3) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 count=1048576
4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 count=1048576
5) power off the machine cold
6) wait 60 seconds and then boot the installer

That resulted in the partition stage simply flowing naturally along
with blank disks for sda and sdb.

Hmm, I have a hard time believing that it's related to that.

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

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 3/28/22 18:00, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Hi!

On 3/28/22 22:58, Dennis Clarke wrote:

Works like a charm!

Good to hear!

Indeed. I am still unsure how I landed in this spot but it all started
with the dreaded nvram --update-config boot-device="" step. That gave
me a machine that simply would not boot however the grub therein was
from somewhere a year ago or so. Or more.

If you're brave enough you can help verify that the G5 will still boot
with the "boot-device" variable in NVRAM set to NULL:

# nvram --update-config boot-device=""

May as well do that today also. I am messing around with a few sparc
netra machines and trying to get network boot working. So I will reply
to the maillist with the results of the nvram setting change.

.
.
.

3) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 count=1048576
4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 count=1048576
5) power off the machine cold
6) wait 60 seconds and then boot the installer

That resulted in the partition stage simply flowing naturally along
with blank disks for sda and sdb.

Hmm, I have a hard time believing that it's related to that.

Totally unrelated. I just did that to ensure that the installer would
only detect two blank disks. It likely makes no difference at all.


--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)