PPC 8500/150

[Guy McArthur]

Yes, you *can* boot Linux from a floppy on an OldWorld PowerPC without 
needing MacOS.

I have Debian 3.0 installed on a PPC 9500 and the steps to create a boot 
floppy are outlined in the Debian install guide for PowerPC.

You can get the floppy disk image from here:
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/disks-powerpc/current/powermac/images-1.44/boot-floppy-hfs.img

You can use their provided perl script to edit the kernel arguments in 
that image.
Instructions and a link to the script are here:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/ch-init-config.en.html#s8.1

For instance, to boot into /dev/sda5 (my linux root partition), you'd do
perl patch-floppy-image.pl 'root=/dev/sda5' boot-floppy-hfs.img > 
boot-floppy-hfs-sda5.img

Then you'd write that image onto a Mac-formatted floppy. I use NTrawrite 
which is available on sourceforge, but there are plenty of other ways. 
Now you'll boot straight into Linux. Their installer uses it, so you can 
wipe out all your MacOS partitions during the install and have a pure 
Linux system (which is what I did).

Now, unfortunately Debian is pretty user-unfriendly. Does anyone know 
how I could boot the YellowDog installer from the floppy image? Do you 
need a second disk (ramdisk image), like the Debian install does? Or can 
you do it simply by changing the kernel arguments, e.g. 'root=/dev/scd0'?