Getting MOL running (was "Re: Power Management et. al.")

[Tovar <tvr@usermail.com>]

   In the 0.9.57 announcement they talk about less dependency on the kernel -
   wonder if that will help for these issues? They say 'it might be necessary to
   recompile MOL from the source in certain cases' for 2.4 kernels...

                                    -- Michel Dänzer <michdaen@iiic.ethz.ch>

Alas, you still have to have just the right kernel and/or other packages
installed to run the pre-compiled binaries under a (custom) Debian 2.4.1 
kernel.  I found one which didn't have link problems, but all it managed 
to do was to dump me into XMON before printing anything useful to tell me 
what went wrong.

   IIRC, MOL has to patch the running kernel under under 2.2 kernels (not
   under 2.4 kernels anymore). SO it does need to know the kernel it is
   patching...
                                        -- Michel Lanners <mlan@cpu.lu>

As noted, alas, it even seems to care about 2.4.x kernels as well somehow??
I tried each of the current RPM's (via 'alien') and none of them would work
for me.  Usually they would get module undef's.  So it ended up compiling 
from most recent source from the MOL site (http://www.maconlinux.com/].

Getting the most recent source to compile was non-trivial. I had to install
several packages to do so (i think they were libelf-dev, libgd1g-dev and 
binutils-dev, and there might be more, since i'd already gotten enough to
try to generate boot floppies). There were no hints to what packages were
needed in BUILDING and the errors manifested mostly as missing 'include'
files.  A few things had to changed by hand, such as the location of the
current kernel (or of XMON), to get it to compile [mol-0.9.57/Rules.make
and also, respectively, added a -I to mol-0.9.57/debugger/mon/Makefile].  
There may have been a few other little details, but that was 3am-ish (with
me in normal day-phase), so i don't remember well what they were.

I have an OF-only video card (ix3D) and i found that build of MOL to be very
finicky about having video parameters right. Come up at the wrong resolution
or pixel depth and it dies in unhelpful ways.  It seems to have various other
reliability issues with my configuration which i will cover at a later time.
One major bother for me was that mol-0.9.57 doesn't handle the MacOS dialog
window which notifies you about repairing your disk.  That can be turned off
via the 'General' control panel (as explained in said dialog if you boot up
with MacOS). The dialog came up completely blank about 95% of the time (with
the remaining case having drawn a small fraction of its window frame). 

Another quirk is that it starts up on the last HFS partition rather than the
more common MacOS choice of the first such partition.  But these partitions
can be named explicitly in '/etc/molrc.  Coming up in the last HFS partition
had a rather humorous result of having MOL trying to boot LINUX from inside 
LINUX...

I didn't get finished trying to get the networking working, nor getting
audio out of it (other than the start-up sound).  But i was surprised and
delighted to have the three AppleShare icons from my i686 Debian box appear
on my MOL desktop.  Running MOL under X is fun, but i was just a slight bit
disappointed that 'startmol' from the i686 produced a screen on a virtual
terminal rather than my non-local X screen, but hey, you can't have every-
thing...  It's amazing it works as well it does!!

So it can be built from sources, but you either need to be experienced at
building/porting, or have someone patient nearby who's willing to help. So
right now, i wouldn't recommend this approach to newcomers.  Nonetheless, 
it seem like a tremendous program which should be VERY useful to me once 
i can address its reliability issues.

                                  -- Tovar