Comment 0 for bug 548804

Binary package hint: debian-installer

Trying to install on an Apple iMac G3 powermac2,2 "Summer 2000 special edition" with a 500Mz PowerPC 750 and 384MB of RAM.

This PC has OS X 10.4.1 Tiger installed and working already with 11GB space left free on the 20GB hard drive to install Ubuntu in a dual-boot configuration.

The machine previously had Ubuntu Jaunty installed from LiveCD and was subsequently dist-upgraded to Karmic, which failed part way through.

As a result it OS X was reinstalled from scratch and now I'm attempting to use the PowerPC port Alternate CD.

During the base-system phase, and the "select and install software" phase, something causes a segmentation fault during some packages extraction/configuration steps. dmesg doesn't contain any helpful information on the precise culprit, and tty1 ncurses dialogs get obliterated by stack traces that are unreadable because each line isn't vertically aligned.

syslog indicates only "segmentation fault" and once I noticed "Illegal instruction".

I had a brief discussion on IRC with cjwatson on how best to diagnose this. The basics are detailed at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Installer/FAQ#How%20do%20I%20debug%20the%20installer?

To avoid the ncurses installer display being messed up by the stack traces and to try and get them in a readable format that may be captureable:

cjwatson: the kernel is just writing that to the foreground console, I think. your best hope is probably to boot with DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text and hope it reproduces with that frontend