Re: Another about installing on an oldworld mac
> My first debian install was potato on my G4/450/AGP, and that went
> relatively smoothly, but unfortunately, that's my work box, and I need to be
> running MacOS 95% of the time on it, so I had to switch back after a few
> days of playing with it...However, I've got an old Power Computing Powerwave
> 132 that I've been trying to install debian on, without a whole lot of
> success. I knew about the OF output to serial port issue beforehand, and
> picked up a Griffin G4port serial port for my G4 so I could set up the Zterm
> terminal app to talk to my Powerwave and tell it to send the output to the
> video card and keyboard (since System Disk gave an error saying it didn't
> work with my machine). I followed all the steps in both Apple's Open
> Firmware Technote and NetBSD's MacPPC FAQ but have not been able to get the
> output to display in Zterm despite trying every combination of settings I
> could find, and even trying plugging into the printer serial port instead of
> the modem port (purely out of desperation), to no avail. The Powerwave stops
> booting in just the right place when I use the OF key combo, but nothing
> shows up in the terminal. I'm totally stumped and haven't been able to find
> any help anywhere else, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
I was successful in the end, with a PowerBase 180. BootVars (v1.3 is
available in the current/powermac folder) worked to set the OF environment
variables from MacOS. BTW, BootX crashed every time I tried it, both at
startup and as an application, and System Disk told me the same thing.
I have BootVars v1.4 but I forgot where I found it.
--
Chris Tillman
tillman@azstarnet.com
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