Re: What needs to be done?

[Gene Heskett <gene_heskett@iolinc.net>]

On Sunday 27 January 2002 03:25 am, Erik van Roode wrote:
>>  Debian Weekly News - January 1st, 2002
>>
>>   This is also the main problem the M68k port suffers from. We
>> may lose that port one day, not because of too few machines
>> that don't keep up with the number of packages, but because
>> there are not enough people actually porting and fixing
>> things.
>
>http://people.debian.org/~cts/debian-m68k/help.html
>  - boot-floppies
>  - kernel-images
>  - fix package compilation bugs
>
>http://people.debian.org/~cts/debian-m68k/woody/
>   - XFree86 (fixed?)
>   - libc6
>   - binutils
>
>I fear the binutils/libc6 to be way over my head, but I'm
> willing to dive into it if needed. XFree86 seems to work,
> kernel 2.2.20 and 2.4.17 seem to work.
>
>Any suggestions on what packages need work the most urgently? My
> GVP Series II and Blizzard 2040 both refuse to play with my
> tape drive, so I'm playing with them, but if there are more
> useful things to work on ...
>
>Erik

Does the tape drive work for AOS3.1 or better?  Diavolo would be 
the test tool of choice for that, I have a DDS2 drive, and its 
always worked for that as long as the terms are properly setup.

One must sacrifice a virgin goat over the scsi bus from time to 
time also.

Check the voltage on the signal lines of the cable while the bus 
is quiet, anything under 2.8 volts makes the term setup highly 
suspect as the logic one noise margin will be reduced to the 
vanishing point.  Std resistive terms really should be avoided, 
and I just accidently found a way to term the end of the cable 
with the much better active termination found on later scsi hard 
drives.  I'd been fighting with a Quantum 6.4g drive, trying to 
get it to properly format, but came to the conclusion that the 
drive was well and truely toast after the low level facility in 
the advansys bios failed for the third time.  My tape drive came 
missing the terminator packs, so I couldn't just remove the disk 
as that would have left the end of the cable unterminated, which 
is an unqualified disaster.

Since the interface stuff on a scsi drive is powered by the term 
power from the cable, I pulled the power plug only on the drive, 
leaving its active termination in place.  It works like a charm, 
and the resting voltage on the data lines is 3.09 volts, so I've 
got a .7 volts noise margin on both logic swings.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
98.4+% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a hillbilly