The installer may be booted using boot files placed on an existing hard drive partition, either launched from another operating system or by invoking a boot loader directly from the BIOS.
A full, “pure network” installation can be achieved using this technique. This avoids all hassles of removable media, like finding and burning CD images or struggling with too numerous and unreliable floppy disks.
The installer cannot boot from files on an HFS+ file system. MacOS
System 8.1 and above may use HFS+ file systems; NewWorld PowerMacs all
use HFS+. To determine whether your existing file system is HFS+,
select Get Info for the volume in question. HFS
file systems appear as Mac OS Standard, while
HFS+ file systems say Mac OS Extended. You must
have an HFS partition in order to exchange files between MacOS and
Linux, in particular the installation files you download.
Different programs are used for hard disk installation system booting, depending on whether the system is a “NewWorld” or an “OldWorld” model.
The boot-floppy-hfs floppy uses
miBoot to launch Linux installation, but
miBoot cannot easily be used for hard disk
booting. BootX, launched from MacOS,
supports booting from files placed on the hard
disk. BootX can also be used to dual-boot
MacOS and Linux after your Debian installation is complete. For the
Performa 6360, it appears that quik cannot make the
hard disk bootable. So BootX is required
on that model.
Download and unstuff the BootX
distribution, available from http://penguinppc.org/projects/bootx/,
or in the
dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/current/powermac
directory on Debian http/ftp mirrors and official Debian CDs. Use
Stuffit Expander to extract it from its
archive. Within the package, there is an empty folder called
Linux Kernels. Download
linux.bin and
ramdisk.image.gz from the
disks-powerpc/current/powermac folder, and place
them in the Linux Kernels folder. Then place the
Linux Kernels folder in the active System Folder.
NewWorld PowerMacs support booting from a network or an ISO9660 CD-ROM, as well as loading ELF binaries directly from the hard disk. These machines will boot Linux directly via yaboot, which supports loading a kernel and RAMdisk directly from an ext2 partition, as well as dual-booting with MacOS. Hard disk booting of the installer is particularly appropriate for newer machines without floppy drives. BootX is not supported and must not be used on NewWorld PowerMacs.
Copy (not move) the following four files which you downloaded earlier from the Debian archives, onto the root level of your hard drive (this can be accomplished by option-dragging each file to the hard drive icon).
vmlinux
initrd.gz
yaboot
yaboot.conf
Make a note of the partition number of the MacOS partition where you place these files. If you have the MacOS pdisk program, you can use the L command to check for the partition number. You will need this partition number for the command you type at the Open Firmware prompt when you boot the installer.
To boot the installer, proceed to Section 5.1.2.3, “Booting NewWorld Macs from OpenFirmware”.