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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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.

yaboot had no graphical capabilities at all, iirc.

          --dkg