Hi there,
I am one of the Debian Developer who is involved in helping to bring the m68k port of Debian back to life. Among the supported platforms of this port has always been the Amiga. The whole m68k port is currently no official port which means you can install it through official install mediums and the packages are hosted on debian-ports.org instead of debian.org.
Anyway, since we're glad to having more people use Debian on their m68k machines and Amigas, here's a short howto on getting Debian running on the Amiga. It's neither very thorough nor perfect and requires some expertise with Linux and AmigaOS, especially when it comes to partitioning hard disks.
Everything you need to type, type it without quotation marks.
What you need
===========
- any Amiga with a 68020 CPU with an MMU, an FPU is optional; the faster, the better
- a recent version of AmigaOS (3.1 or newer) with the most recent versions of HDToolBox and scsi.device (to be able to properly work with large drives >4 GB)
- at least 64MB of Fast RAM (haven't tested on 32 MB, might work as well)
- a hard disk with at least 4 GB (I recommended 40 GB at least)
- a PC running Linux (Debian is highly recommended since it ships all the useful packages required to work with the Amiga hard disk on the PC) with the possibility to hook up the Amiga hard disk (either IDE or SCSI)
- optional, but highly recommended: a network card supported on Linux/m68k (note: most PCMCIA card supported on Linux (PC) do not work on Linux/m68k, see:
http://www.g-mb.de/pcmcia_e.html; Zorro II cards usually like the Ariadne work fine)
- optional, but highly recommended: a serial null modem cable hooking your Amiga to the PC running Linux
Installation
========
1. Prepare the hard disk of your Amiga with HDToolBox; create some space for the installation of AmigaOS (1 GB should be more than enough) and leave the rest empty
2. Take out the hard disk and hook it up to a PC running Debian Linux
3. On the Debian PC, install the package "amiga-fdisk-cross" ("apt-get install amiga-fdisk-cross" as root)
4. As root, run "amiga-fdisk" to create a root partition of at least 4 GB plus a swap partition on the Amiga hard disk (you can use this guide on "fdisk" to learn how to use "amiga-fdisk":
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/fdisk_partitioning.html; "fdisk" is an old and simple tool for partitioning hard disks on Linux, "amiga-fdisk" is the version which supports Amiga partitions and is designed to be used in the same way as the conventional "fdisk")
NOTE: On the PC, the Amiga hard disk will probably be named "sdb": If your PC has one hard disk (which is named "sda") such that the second hard disk (the Amiga hard disk) will be called "sdb"; on the Amiga (when running Linux), there is only one hard disk and thus the disk will be named "sda" (this is important for the kernel boot command line later in the AmigaOS script "StartInstall"). Make always sure you are working on the correct disk when partitioning; it may even happen that your Amiga disk is named "sda" and your primary disk in your PC is named "sdb" while the Amiga disk is hooked up (Linux usually dynamically names the disks in the order it recognizes them!). You can use "dmesg | less" too see the kernel log which shows which disks were detected and how they were named or "cat /proc/partitions" to see the actual partitions on a disk and their sizes. Don't say you haven't been warned, BE CAREFUL!
5. Format the newly created root partition on the Amiga hard disk with ext4: "mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb2" (if the Amiga hard disk is recognized as "sdb" on your PC and the newly created root partition is "sdb2"; make sure to not confuse the device names, you might overwrite partitions of your PC; when in doubt, check "dmesg" or "cat /proc/partitions" to see which disk is your Amiga hard disk)
6. Mount the newly created root partition on the Amiga hard disk on your PC running Debian, for example: mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb2 /mnt
7. Change into the directory where the Amiga root partition was mounted: "cd /mnt"
8. wget
http://people.debian.org/~tg/f/20121227/m68k-base.tgz9. tar xzf m68k-base.tgz (extract the base filesystem)
10. mv m68k-base/* . (note the little dot; move all files into the root directory)
11. rmdir m68k-base (delete the empty directory)
12. cd && umount /mnt (change back to your home directory and unmount the Amiga root filesystem)
13. mount /dev/sdb1 -t affs /mnt (mount the AmigaOS partition on your Linux host)
14. cd /mnt
15. mkdir boot-debian
16. cd boot-debian
17. wget
http://people.debian.org/~tg/f/20121227/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga (download the compressed kernel image for Amiga)
18. mv vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga.gz && gunzip vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga.gz (uncompress the compressed kernel image; required for Amiboot 5.6)
19. wget
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-3.0/main/disks-m68k/current/amiga/amiboot-5.620. wget
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-3.0/main/disks-m68k/current/amiga/StartInstall && wget
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-3.0/main/disks-m68k/current/amiga/StartInstall.info21. Use your favourite editor to edit StartInstall to contain the following:
"amiboot-5.6 -d -k vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga root=/dev/sda2 fb=false"
If you would like output over serial console, add: console=ttyS0,9600n8:
"amiboot-5.6 -d -k vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga root=/dev/sda2 fb=false console=ttyS0,9600n8"
22. cd && umount /mnt
23. Shutdown your Debian PC and take out the Amiga hard disk; hook it up to your Amiga and boot into AmigaOS
24. open up the hidden folder "boot-debian" on DH0:
25. double click "StartInstall" and see your Amiga boot into Debian Linux
26. when using a serial console, install and run minicom on the Debian PC, configure it to use the device "/dev/ttyS0" with 9600 bps (anything faster won't work!)
Have fun!
Adrian