On Thursday, August 19, 2004, at 12:08 PM, Rick Thomas wrote:
On Thursday, August 19, 2004, at 05:00 AM, Sven Luther wrote:happy floppy disk reading noises. However, the noises eventuallystopped and a red "X" appeared over the TuxMac. Then nothing. I had tomanually eject the floppy from the drive.What we need would be a way to get a log of it or something.I'll try booting from open-firmware directly on a serial console. It may take a couple of trys. I've never done that before on a Mac (On a Sun/sparc machine, it's standard operating procedure, and I've got lots of experience with Suns -- so it's not completely unexplored teritory!) Maybe there will be some console messages that will be helpful.
Well... Try one gives no help.I booted my PowerMac 6500 with "Cmd-Opt-O-F" keys, while watching the 6500's "modem" serial port on another machine running MacOS-9 with MacKermit at 38400 bps. I found myself talking to the Open Firmware monitor on the 6500, as expected. I was able to do a couple of the exercises in Apple Tech Note 1061 ("Fundamentals of Open Firmware, part I: The User Interface"). I was feeling encouraged... so I typed "boot" with the floppy disk in the drive. It read the floppy. Nothing appeared on the serial console. Peeking at the monitor on the 6500, all I saw there was a black screen. Eventually, the floppy reading noises stopped, but still nothing on the serial console and nothing on the 6500's monitor. I waited a while. No change.
I've been warned by someone at work that the Linux Kernel may change the console's bit-rate to either 19200 or 9600 bits/sec. And once the reading noises stop, it does seem that the console has switched to 19200, because at that speed, things I type on it are echoed coherently -- at any other speed, things I type are garbled. But all it does is echo what I type. It does nothing useful that I can see. In particular, there are no error or debug/progress messages of any kind.
Sigh!Is there some kind of a boot-time parameter that one can set to tell the Linux Kernel to print verbose debugging progress messages on the serial console?
While I'm asking, does anyone know how to tell the Macintosh Open Firmware monitor to set the terminal speed. I'm thinking that if the Linux Kernel wants 19200, then it would be a good idea to be talking to the Open Firmware at the same speed, so things don't get lost in the switch-over.
Enjoy! Rick