Re: Another about installing on an oldworld mac
On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 09:07:54AM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote:
> > 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.
I had quik and OF booting working some of the time with a powerbase 200
but found that BootX worked ALL the time so I gave up and used that.
The whole serial port thing was too much work and too unreliable. I
could never get quik to boot unattended into linux, but could do
that with bootx.
Seems to me you need a full bag of tricks to work with the PCI clones.
What works for some of us on some models never works for others on
other models. YMMV.
cfm
--
Christopher F. Miller, Publisher cfm@maine.com
MaineStreet Communications, Inc 208 Portland Road, Gray, ME 04039
1.207.657.5078 http://www.maine.com/
Content management, electronic commerce, internet integration, Debian linux
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