Remember that a minimal sources.list must contain one line for the “unstable” distribution and one line for the “unreleased” distribution!

Installing Debian/m68k

Quickstart

ARAnyM images

Pre-made ARAnyM hard disc images (byte-swapped, i.e. directly usable by ARAnyM) are here, configuration and kernels included. Last Update: 2012-04 (April 2012)

Debian-Installer

http://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/ contains a d-i build by WouterVerhelst. Last Update: 2012-12 (December 2012)

Installing from d-i is currently untested and most likely not working because it uses debootstrap, which can only install from unstable without taking the Debian-Ports "unreleased" suite into account. A workaround is being worked on.

This version of d-i currently supports Amiga and Atari computers.

Pre-made filesystems

Filesystem images

Pre-made ext2fs (384 MiB) with base system (debootstrap --variant=base) plus a couple of packages, pre-configured, includes 128 MiB swapfile; login root:root ⇒ download from people.debian.org (mirror); Last Update: 2012-12 (December 2012)

Filesystem tarballs

Pre-made tarball with base system (debootstrap --variant=base) plus a couple of packages, pre-configured except fstab; login root:root ⇒ download from people.debian.org (mirror); Last Update: 2012-12 (December 2012)

build chroot tarballs

Pre-made tarball with package build system (debootstrap --variant=buildd) and policy-rc.d to deny dæmon start ⇒ download from people.debian.org (mirror); Last Update: 2012-12 (December 2012)

Pre-made /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow image (from “cowbuilder --create”) can be downloaded here. Last Update: 2012-04 (April 2012)

Kernels

Linux 3.2.35-2 (Debian ABI 3.2(.0)-4) ⇒ download from people.debian.org (mirror)

Debootstrap

It is currently not possible to simply debootstrap because we require both the “unstable” and “unreleased” suite. A combined repository of both (only the most important gigabyte of packages) is however available, and you can debootstrap from that as follows:

Multistrap

It should be possible to use that and pull directly from official Debian-Ports repositories, from an installed system that’s more up-to-date than etch-m68k. (The only “upgrade” path from etch-m68k we support is un-tarring one of the tarballs above and booting into them.) There’s no multistrap configuration as of yet, but if you know how to write one already, use the following two APT repositories combined into one:

Of course, feel free to paste a working configuration below ;-)

Booting and installing Debian/m68k on an Amiga

To boot Debian on Amiga systems, a utility called amiboot is required. There are two commonly used versions of amiboot available, 5.6 and 6.0snapshot. Version 5.6 was shipped up to including Debian Sarge, while Etch and newer releases use 6.0snapshot. However, amiboot 6.0snapshot has some issues (see http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2013/04/msg00037.html for example) and it is therefore sometimes advisable to resort to amiboot 5.6 which usually works fine in these cases but requires the kernels to be decompressed prior use. This can be achieved using the UnARC utility part of AmigaOS 3.9 or similar utility from AmiNet.

A typical command line to boot Linux with amiboot looks like this:

amiboot -d -k //kernels/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga -r //cdrom/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram fb=false

This enables debugging through serial console, loads the kernel from ../../kernel/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga and the compressed initrd from ../../cdrom/initrd.gz and disables the framebuffer. It can be helpful to redirect the console output to the serial console of the Amiga by adding "console=ttyS0,9600n8" to the kernel command line for the first boot attempts. It also helps when there is no video coming up due to a flicker fixer installed. If everything goes right, the machine should boot into Linux without problems.

The following Debian releases are available for install on Amiga:

It's highly recommended to copy all installer files onto an AmigaOS partition, then running amiboot to boot into Linux. This allows to conveniently edit the command line for amiboot in a Amiga shell script which can later be used to boot into Linux by double-clicking its icon. Editing the amiboot; command line can be necessary when changing the version of amiboot used, enabling serial console or extra debugging (see above). Copying all installer files onto hard disk also helps avoiding problems with unsupported SCSI controllers which attach the CD-ROM drive used to the Amiga. The very popular Squirrel SCSI PCMCIA adaptor is unsupported on Linux, for example. Accessing installer files on a hard disk will always work (provided that the disk is connected to the internal IDE controller, in case of Amiga 600/1200).

There are several Amiga shell scripts available to boot into Linux for installation, depending on the video card used:

Installation notes for the various graphics cards are supplied in the Amiga installation directory. StartInstall; should work for most users. If no video output can be seen after booting Linux, it may help to use serial console (see above).

After successfully booting into Linux, Debian Installer will start and try to detect the available disks and hardware. In order to do a network installation, a supported network card is required (see http://www.g-mb.de/pcmcia_e.html for an incomplete list of PCMCIA network cards supported on the Amiga 600/1200, for example; not all PCMCIA network adapters supported by the Linux kernel actually work on Amiga hardware due to a different PCMCIA driver layer used for the Amiga).