installing debian ppc on a tibook 500.
Pretty straightforward. Gets audio AND the airport card right off the bat. Heck, it gets the airport during the INSTALL boot.
To dual boot:
1. Install OSX first. Use the Disk Utility from the drop-down in the top menu to partition the disk. For some reason, my Tiger installer is stupid about doing partitions — it would only allow me to do them in even parts (and also leaves a tiny 134 MB partition between spaces, as if it needs some kind of ‘buffer’). Meh — I guess if you want a real partioner, use one from a boot cd before you throw in the OSX Install. I ended up installing OSX 5-6 times in this process, and debian at least 3-4 times, so I just decided to live with it. Curse you, Steve Jobs.
2. Install debian from a netinst CD. The easy way: when you get to partitioning, erase the latter Mac partition (your actual install will be on the first HFS+ partition). Then back up and select ‘guided install’, then ‘largest contiguous free space’, then ‘all in one partition’, and debian will take care of everything for you. Good enough for me.
A couple hitches, however:
* Bombs out during software config/install. Just run it again and it’ll get through the second time.
* if you selected 1152x768 as the screen res, gdm shows a blank screen post boot. this is annoying, because the keyboard won’t be set up in such a manner that you can flip to a console, and there is no good info on “yaboot console without gdm” on google. There’s some obscure flags that’ll let you get to the console from the yaboot loader prompt (and I found it last night, but was unable to locate that method after an hour of searching today), but the easy way to do it is just to load “Linux video=ofonly”. This should fail to load xserver and kick you to text mode. Awesome! Log in as root and type in ‘dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg’. Leave everything as it is set, EXCEPT make sure you select “yes” for Use kernel framebuffer device interface (this was set to NO when I got console via the video=ofonly option) and select 1152 x 768 when you get the resolutions screen. Reboot and you should find yourself looking at the gnome login!
