Debian Jessie boots to black screen on an Apple eMac

[kryptenasi]

I've set up my eMac (pretty much an iMac G4 with a CRT) to dual boot OS X 10.5.8 and Debian Jessie. I select to boot into Debian from the first boot menu, type "Linux" at the second one, there's a few seconds of scrolling text and... nothing. The computer freezes at a completely blank screen. I've heard that there's a bug with Radeon graphics cards, but I'm not sure if that's entirely to blame, because I've passed some of the recommend boot parameters to resolve the issue, but none of them worked. I have no clue what's going on, as I have little experience with Debian. My specs are: 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 CPU, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card with 64MB VRAM

[kiyop]

I've set up my eMac (pretty much an iMac G4 with a CRT) to dual boot OS X 10.5.8 and Debian Jessie.

Write more concretely what you did.

I select to boot into Debian from the first boot menu, type "Linux" at the second one, there's a few seconds of scrolling text and... nothing. The computer freezes at a completely blank screen. I've heard that there's a bug with Radeon graphics cards, but I'm not sure if that's entirely to blame, because I've passed some of the recommend boot parameters to resolve the issue, but none of them worked.

Write more concretely what you did.

[oswaldkelso]

You may get some pointers here.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=128372

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=120127

[kryptenasi]

Write more concretely what you did.

I used the OS X Disk Utility to shrink the OS X partition and create the root and swap partitions. Then in the installation CD I created a 800KB New World boot partition (or whatever it was called ). It was pretty late so I went to bed and in the morning the installation finished successfully. The root partition is 33.5GB and the swap is 1.2GB. The boot parameters I tried include "radeon.agpmode=-1", "video=radeonfb". Stuff like that to try to get the graphics card working.

[kiyop]

Thanks for your writing some detail of what you did.
I cannot understand how you started debian installation (URL where you downloaded CD iso image and so on), but I can suggest something.
If you select recovery mode (single user mode), is some prompt displayed? Such as "login:" ?
"nomodeset" is a candidate kernel parameter.
I wonder if you give boot (kernel) parameter wrongly.
Is "grub(2)" screen displayed at boot time?
How do you give boot (kernel) parameter?

Also, read the URL suggested by oswaldkelso.