Bug#264963: Re: Bug#264963: Installation report for Apple Blue & White G3 400 from netinstall CD (powerpc, RC1)
My reply is after the inclusion of your (long and interesting) email.
I got flamed a while ago for top-posting on the debian lists. So...
"When in Rome..."
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you!
On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 10:37, Evilpig wrote:
> Hi Rick,
>
> On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 21:50:00 -0400, Rick Thomas <rbthomas55@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > Worry not! I have an equivalent machine that I recently successfully got
> > Debian Sarge working on. I saw your message and got curious, so I did
> > the above stuff on it and sent the results to Colin. Let me know if
> > there's anything I can do to help you get yours working...
>
> Hehe, I've been keeping your installation report threads in my Inbox
> so I could follow them more easily ;-)
>
> What type of machine is yours? Mine's a Rev. 1 blue & white, so it's
> been problematic almost from the beginning. It was my first mac, and
> I've refused to buy rev. 1 apple products ever since ;-P. The most
> annoying thing about it hardware-wise is the horrible IDE problems
> those machines have. Since I ordered it from Apple with all the SCSI
> gear (Adaptec HBA's and the 9GB IBM drive), I didn't encounter the IDE
> issues until a few years later. I had a couple of spare 40GB IDE
> drives sitting around so I decided to drop them in the G3 to increase
> the amount of drive space and have a multiboot system. I didn't even
> get around to installing any other OS on them because I kept
> experiencing mysterious file corruption in my OS X installs. After
> doing some research I found out that basically the only way to use IDE
> hard drives in them is to buy an IDE controller card. At this point I
> have no compelling reason to sink any more money into that machine so
> I just went back to using the SCSI drives and decided that "18GB
> should be enough for anyone!" ;-).
>
> I have never managed to get Debian running on it, but I'm optimistic
> about this release. The Woody install CD tried to load a different
> SCSI driver (not aic7xxx), which caused the machine to lock up during
> the process of booting the installer kernel. I decided I had better
> test the new installer on this machine since it seemed like nobody did
> last time ;-P It loads the correct SCSI driver and makes it all the
> way through the installer, so that's huge progress.
>
> If it's not too much trouble, I'd be interested to see what a
> successful boot process on these machines looks like. If you could
> send me a post-boot dmesg or something of the like, I'd be quite
> grateful ;-)
>
> Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you with anything too!
>
> - Colleen
I've got several different kinds of machines. One of them happens to be
a Rev 1 Blue&White. It has an oddball video card in it, and the type
face on the screen during installation is almost unreadably small with
the video=ofonly option -- no other video option works at all. So I
haven't tried very hard to get Debian to install on it. When i do try,
I run up against another problem: It has a SIIG ultra-IDE/133 card in
it, that the d-i has trouble recognizing. Unfortunately, that's where
my spare disk resides, and I can't afford the time to do a full backup
and reformat of the main (MacOS-9) disk, which resides on the on-board
IDE controller, right now. So when I try, I don't get past the
partitioner. It's also got an Adatptec SCSI card in it, that I use to
connect it to old SCSI Mac peripherals like my SCSI Zip and Jaz drives.
The installer should recognize that too, but it doesn't. Sigh! As you
say... "problematic from the beginning".
I've got a G4/350MHz sitting next to me that I'm going to try to install
the "20040816" daily businesscard on. If I succeed, I'll send you a
blow-by-blow report (actually, I'll just CC you on the installation
report, but that should give you most of the info you want.) Keep in
touch! And CC the list: There are others out there like us who need
the information!
Enjoy!
Rick
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