Re: debian-installer: please default to grub-ieee1275 on powerpc instead of yaboot

[Gabriel Paubert]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 12:10:17PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Thu 2017-09-21 10:26:08 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> > I like this idea but i don't have a lot of spare machines handy to try
> > d-i on these days.  I can try to dig up a power supply for an idle older
> > ppc laptop i've got floating around, but i don't know whether i'll be
> > able to find it.
> 
> I should mention: i currently run (and have run in the past) many
> powerpc systems (old Mac hardware, mainly, running an OpenFirmware forth
> shell from the mainboard), all of which i either directly installed with
> grub (via debootstrap from debirf) or converted from yaboot to grub.
> I've yet to find one (even a really old blue clamshell iBook with 64MiB
> of RAM) that grub didn't work for me on in the end.  So for the machines
> i've dealt with, the question is more about d-i integration than about
> whether grub will work or not.
> 
> I do note that there have been some interesting endianness issues
> (e.g. channel-swap, or palette inversion) with the colorspace when
> trying to use grub's graphical mode (but i've seen similar issues with
> non-grub stuff as well).  I don't know how much we care in this
> discussion about grub's graphical capabilities, as compared to its
> booting capabilities.

Well, I have grub on my PowerStation (~quad G5), although I'm still 
using 32 bit userspace (from Debian Sid). I did not try to switch to
64 bit while it still had the original 2GB of RAM and even light use
caused significant swapping (and associated slowdowns); now that it 
has 32GB, I think it can be switched to 64 bit and I plan to do it soon
(November or so, I'm moving in between).

But I digress, coming back to grub: not only are the colors off during 
boot, but also the boot menu text entries are not displayed correctly 
(they only appear briefly just before the wait for keyboard input times
out). 

Also the first text lines (from grub?) are displayed won't make your
eyes bleed but will be difficult to decrypt in case of problems: they
are displyed in black on a black background. 

        Gabriel
> 
> yaboot had no graphical capabilities at all, iirc.
> 
>           --dkg