I inserted my debian powerpc CD into my emac powerpc and I started the booting process. Now it says "the CD-ROM drive contains a CD which cannot be used for installation. Please insert a suitable CD that can be used for installation"
Did I just burn it wrong? Or what?

Lot's of different models of

You might want to look through below link and see if your emac is supported first.

http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/install

Also did you burn the cd as a image or data cd?

Some search help below also.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...archid=4178715

I am not exactly sure, I used this link http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst and clicked powerpc under Small CD's.

I don't know off the top of my head if you can do a Debian Net install on a Mac. You probably have to burn a Full Debian PPC Iso to install Debian on a PPC.


If me. I would grab a Iso from

http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php

After reading up. I guess you should be able to do a net install on power pc. But here are the full iso's of Debian testing (Debian Squeeze) for PPC Below.

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/we...owerpc/iso-cd/

I used that link you gave me and I tried installing it, now it says "Your installation CD-ROM couldn't be mounted. This probably means that the CD-ROM isn't in the drive."
I'm not positive that I'm burning it right.

Are you burning it as a Image CD?

Also. I have read that

From

http://seb.france.free.fr/linux/iboo...kG4-howto.html

and

http://seb.france.free.fr/linux/iboo...o-2.html#ss2.1

Well in addition to booting the cd on a mac, I have an iMac where I do my downloading and burning. Once downloaded, I take the file "debian-testing-powerpc-CD-1.iso" and burn its contents to a CD using Disk Utility.
Does it need to be a .dmg so it's a disk image? or a .iso?

I don't run a Mac or Disk Utilities. So You will have to search the internet for burning a bootable cd using Mac Tools.

I'm running into the same problem trying to install Debian testing using the full ISO (not net install) on my iMac G5 revC (iSight model).

What I did first was to download the ISOs (on my MB Pro running Snow Leopard), then after right-clicking them in the Finder selected "Burn to Disc" (bypassing Disk Utility). These CDs wouldn't boot in my iMac, and only then did I realize that by using the Finder, I'd burned the ISOs directly (that is, each CD contained one big ISO file. . . ). So I went back to the MB Pro, mounted the ISOs and "Burn[ed] to Disc" again from the resulting disk images (that is, I burned data CDs and not ISOs), and tried the install again.

Trying to boot to CD (holding down the 'c' key on hearing the startup chime) did absolutely nothing, and my iMac booted into OS X as usual (it wasn't a Bluetooth problem, since I use a USB keyboard). Anyway, after this happened twice, I tried booting into Open Firmware and issued the command

which brought up yaboot. I chose the option

to start the installer, and then chose my language and keyboard layout, but when I got to the 'Detect and mount CD-ROM' step, I got the error:

Just for fun, I inserted the first CD from the other set (the ones that each contained a big ISO)--same error message.

So, that's where I am now, and some Googling just brought me to your two-week-old thread. Have you solved the problem?

Okay, I tried another way of burning the CDs, and it appears to be working:

I opened Disk Utility, selected from the left-hand menu the blank CD that I'd inserted, chose 'Burn' in the button bar, selected the ISO file (it wouldn't allow me to select the mounted disk image), and started the burn.

When it finished, I was left with a CD that contained data. I tried it in the installer on the iMac (which I left running from last time), and continuing to the 'Detect and mount CD-ROM' step--lo and behold--I get:

Hooray!

Ya I have the same problem as you, I will try what you said. Thanks

BTW, you should install the stable distribution of Debian (5.0 / Lenny), and *not* the testing (Squeeze). You won't be able to install the bootloader if you install Squeeze. I ran into that problem myself, and after searching found a bug report about it here. From the report:

The report is from late July; there's a note at the bottom from the author saying that he's submitted a partial fix here if you'd like to play around some.