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joining this list



Hi folks.

Your friendly neighborhood XFree86 maintainer would like to join the m68k
porting effort.

It is my intention to use an m68k machine I bought this week as a platform
to compile and test XFree86 on.  However, I have a few questions.

First, the machine's specs:

Macintosh Quadra 840AV (68040 @ 40MHz)
64MB RAM
230MB Quantum HD
2GB Segate 5240N HD

I burned a Debian 2.2r2 binary-m68k-1+NONUS CD and used it to install.

1) The on-board Ethernet is not being detected by the kernel.  This would
appear to be because someone assumed that the entire Quadra line used the
SONIC Ethernet controller, but according to several resources on the web,
such as <http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n16852>, the Quadra
AV's actually use the MACE controller (just like the PowerMac 7200; I know
that the Linux MACE driver works on that machine).  Is there a kernel
command line option I can give (e.g., "eth0=mace" or something like that?)
to rectify this, or is the MACE driver even built for the 68k kernel?

2) I am getting *really* hard machine lockups during heavy disk access
(such as, say, a dpkg --unpack of every package auto-selected by dselect).
There doesn't seem to be Magic SysRq support in the stock kernel.  I have
to take the machine down with the power switch, and both times this has
happened, the filesystem has been so f*cked that I had to fsck it manually.
I do realize that these boxes are slow, however, after the second apparent
lockup (dpkg --unpack mutt), I let the box sit for several hours just in
case it was busy thinking about the operation.  No go.  It really was
locked.

Does this scenario sound familiar to anyone?  I'm installing to the 2GB
drive, which I have used before in an i386 box, in which it appeared to
work fine, so I am not sure whether to blame the drive, the SCSI controller
on the Mac, the kernel SCSI driver, or some other kernel bug.

I'm eager to get this machine's cherry popped by starting an XFree86 4.0.3
build on it.  Any assistance you guys can offer would be greatly
appreciated.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson            |        "To be is to do"   -- Plato
Debian GNU/Linux               |        "To do is to be"   -- Aristotle
branden@deadbeast.net          |        "Do be do be do"   -- Sinatra
http://deadbeast.net/~branden/ |

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