Hi Debian, welcome to 1904

I tried to install Debian onto an old PPC iMac with 300MB RAM without success.

Firstly, the testing network and business card installers would segfault when booting. A known problem which hasn’t yet been fixed.

No matter, I just switched to the stable network installer and began my journey. Problem is, it gets stuck at configuring packages. Just sits there at 1% forever. When I see the log, I notice that it’s prompting me to confirm the installation of packages, which is hidden from the main screen and therefore what was causing it to die.

Changing root into /target I ran a few commands myself and noticed that apt-get update said that the GPG keys from debian-archive-keyring were invalid.

DAMN. What’s going on..

So I tried everything I could to fix it. Googled and Googled and Googled to no avail. Lots of people had similar issues, but forcing a re-install of debian-archive-keyring fixed it for them. Others said to use a different mirror.

I was about to curse Debian for no-longer caring about PPC and then it hit me. Check the date of the machine. Yes, sir, it was 3rd January 1904 – as far as Debian was concerned, the keys were well and truly invalid.

So a simple, apt-get install ntpdate && ntpdate ntp.internode.on.net and everything was sweet. Why it didn’t do this properly when I configured the time during the installer I don’t know. Nevertheless, I’m happy again.

Silly me.

-c