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considering debian/mac os 9 dual boot

Submitted by westieg3 on September 21, 2007 - 12:17am. Unix and Mac OS X

in efforts of trying to avoid needing a dvd decoder card to watch movies on the new drive for my wallstreet, i'm considering a dual-boot system on my 20gb ibm drive combining os 9 and debian 4.0. i want debain since i know it can run vlc player which has the mpeg2 codecs built in. i need to test this on my old 4gb drive first to see if debian runs fast enough for dvd playback first, but i was considering it as just a bare-bones system for media use.

i read up on the debian guide on installing from the hard drive using bootx. does this install allow me to put debian on the same partition as os 9? i can back up everything to cd, but having to back up, partition, install both systems, and then recover my files would be a pain. i'd prefer just to do it on one partition (and no i never want to use os x on the wallstreet ever again). ideas?

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alk's picture

I don't think Debian will wor

Submitted by alk on September 21, 2007 - 5:39am.

I don't think Debian will work w/ HFS like that. It probably expects to be on it's own file system such as Reiser FS, ext2, or something. BootX will boot a ramdisk image, however, so you can probably get a really stripped down system installed on HFS and booted directly into RAM.

There's really no simple way around it. You need to partition your disk.

Peace,
Drew

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westieg3's picture

well that'll be a pain in the

Submitted by westieg3 on September 21, 2007 - 7:39pm.

well that'll be a pain in the ass. thank god, most of my files on here are mp3s that i already backed up to cd (which in of itself was painful). i'll just have to copy my extensions folder and other things to disk to keep my codecs and extra apps.

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westieg3's picture

out of curiousity, i did just

Submitted by westieg3 on September 22, 2007 - 3:48am.

out of curiousity, i did just try xpostfacto and 10.3.9 on the 4 gig hard drive to see what it would do. i have to say...it's surprisingly fast on this thing! vlc player did work, but the video was insanely choppy, i'm assuming from x taking up so much of my 192mb of ram. i'll erase the 4 gig and install debian on it tomorrow to see how it does, and then consider whether or not i want to take the time to partition my 20 gig drive.

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alk's picture

What are the specs on your Wa

Submitted by alk on September 22, 2007 - 5:56am.

What are the specs on your Wallstreet? Unless it is upgraded with a fast G3 or G4 (say, at least 500 MHz), I don't think you'll get VLC working well even in Linux. The 300 MHz top-speed Wallstreet just doesn't have the muscle to decode DVDs. I'd certainly give it a try on a small drive before you go nuking your partition map.

Peace,
Drew

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westieg3's picture

yea i'd agree with that. i am

Submitted by westieg3 on September 22, 2007 - 6:36pm.

yea i'd agree with that. i am looking into upgrading the processor in the future (is there any company that still sells them?). i'm just hoping debian will be peppier since it's easier on the ram. the wallstreet is only a 250 though, but hopefully it'll be just enough power for dvd since that seems to be easier for vlc to decode than avi is.

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DrBunsen's picture

Re: yea i'd agree with that. i am

Submitted by DrBunsen on September 24, 2007 - 2:40am.
westieg3 wrote:
upgrading the processor / (is there any company that still sells them?)

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westieg3's picture

glad to see at least one comp

Submitted by westieg3 on September 24, 2007 - 11:30pm.

glad to see at least one company still is. alright, i've tried 4 times and cant get debian to boot at all (thank god it's a spare drive). the computer simply refuses even despite bootx on the os 9 partition. perhaps debian 4.0 doesn't support the wallstreet and i need an older version? i'm trying ubuntu next as much as i hated it on my amd.

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