Hi all,

I'm trying to get a Mac Performa 5200 to run Debian, may sound whacky but apparently people have achieved this. Now this may sound like a really dumb question but I'm not really used to Macs. Can anyone tell me how to change the boot sequence, whatever I put in the cdrom drive it still boots straight off the hard drive, so I can't figure out hoe to indtall any alternative operating system. I just don't seem to be able to find where or how I can make the machine boot from cdrom.

Thanks all,

Draiocht

Insert the CD as soon as you power on. Press and hold the 'C' key before "Happy Mac" appears on the screen. If you're lucky, you'll boot off the CD.

Incidentally, if you succeed, please post your steps here. I've got a related Road Apple that I'd like to run Linux on as well.

Usually for Old World PCI Macs you boot from a floppy disk that you get from the Debian site (there is no free CD bootloader for Old World). But Performa 5200 is a Nubus machine (i.e. no OpenFirmware); so you need to use the Linux Nubus kernel instead of the regular Linux PPC kernel, and you will need to figure out that part. On that link you will find installation notes from people who've installed before in the "Useful Documents" section.

To PaganHippie: what model Mac do you have? Linux support and installation varies between different Macs.

Mine is a PowerMac 5200/75LC (the U.S. education market version of the Performa 5200). I was under the impression that these systems were un-Linuxable because [1] they have a 'split bus' (which effectively reduces the 75MHz processor clock to 37.5 MHz and makes I/O a pain besides), and [2] they have no DMA, so *everything* that happens requires CPU attention. It's currently running MacOS 9.0.4. Slowly. Very slowly.

Thanks for the replies Pagan and Spooon. I have read about exactly the prohibitive problems that you describe, and yet I've also read posts from people who have got Debian running on these things, albeit with some minor problems, hence their posts. For some reason I just can't seem to let this one go, I haven't ruled out insanity of course, but hey, I've known that for years. I'm going to keep researching and trying with this so I'll post here on progress, or lack of it.

Regards,

Draiocht