Re: Debian on a Mac Quadra 700
Jim Hague wrote:
> On 23-Oct-2002 Chris Tillman wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 03:26:17PM +0100, Jim Hague wrote:
> >> I'm attempting to turn a comprehensively redundant Quadra 700 into something
> >> useful.
> >>
> >> The beast has 20Mb RAM, and an external 1Gb 'd2' (that's what it says on the
> >> front) disc in addition to the internal 40Mb drive.
> >>
> >> I've made a root and a swap partition on the external disc.
> >>
> >> Installing Woody via Penguin 1.9 is not going well, though. Frequently the
> >> boot
> >> gets stuck at video initialisation, showing the b/w penguin and
> >> 'ABCDEFGHIJ'.
> >> Other times it boots properly and installation begins, only to run into the
> >> sand in a variety of ways, often involving one of several kernel panics
> >> (dereferencing NULL pointer, Freeing swap cache etc.) Otherwise files are
> >> reported as corrupt after downloading, or it just freezes up.
> >>
> >> I see the Quadra 700 is on the hardware list as working fine. MacOS doesn't
> >> seem to have any trouble working properly.
> >
> > These are the same problems I have run into with my Quadra 650 with
> > external hard drive install. It's basically unusable. I hope someone
> > has a clue. I was thinking maybe it was my memory wasn't up to speed
> > or that Linux is not happy with the external drive.
>
> Greger Olson pointed me at the linux-mac68k mailing list. In the archives I
> found a note from Tim Starr suggesting that booting with MacOS extensions off
> was a good idea.
>
> For me, it was a damm fine idea. My Quadra is now stable, happily installed and
> churning its way slowly through an apt-get.
About 1,5 years ago I also had a Quadra700. Some of these seem to be
equipped with a very early model 68040. I had gotten this machine for
free from a friend. I had most of the problems described above, but also
had file-system troubles in MacOS (7.5.3 and 7.5.5). The original owner
told me I had to turn of CPU-caching in the MacOS Cache Control Panel.
This did the trick for MacOS, but not for Linux.
I received alot of help, first from the Linux/Mac68k maillist and
kernel-hackers (linux-mac68k@mac.linux-m68k.org) and later also the
Linux/m68k maillist and kernel-hackers
(linux-m68k@lists.linux-m68k.org). The conclusion was that some very
early revisions of the full 68040 are a bit broken. There is no info
about this on the Motorola website, I couldn't debug it enough (can't
even write C) and so we didn't have enough information to fix the
kernel. I even tried compiling a kernel that kept CPU-caching disabled
all the time. Apart from making Linux very, very slow this didn't work.
Also MacOS didn't have such a huge slowdown, so we concluded there must
be other tricks involved, but could not find out which tricks.
(At this moment I don't have the Q700 anymore. I've given it to someone
who has a little mac-museum around here. I've bought a Q650 which
doesn't have the problems described above.)
For kernel- and booting problems see the faqs on www.mac.linux-m68k.org.
Standard advise is to try booting the Linux-kernel with:
- extensions off and/or
- as much cards removed from the slots as possible and/or
- the network-cable disconnected from any network-cards if applicable.
To see what is happening and whats not before the video-initialisation
you can send debug info to another machine via the serial interface.
This helps alot I can tell from experience.
If booting with extensions off etc. doesn't do the trick for either one
of you, and you're willing to debug this, please mail the Linux-m68k
maillist. If the problem is with the CPU-caches the problem isn't
Mac-specific, so you'll find the best kernel-hackers there. The
Mac-specific kernel-hackers on the Linux-Mac68k maillist would probably
like to be kept informed (cc), and maybe can help disecting the MacOS
Cache Control Panel to see what is does.
I'm on both maillists and will offer any information on the (history of
the) problem, if I've left anything out in the description above.
HTH, Erik.
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik C.J. Laan elaan at dds.nl
Please reply below the message, please cut unrelevant pieces from a
reply.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: