Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 01:14:49PM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote: Reset (zap) the PRAM. Turn the power off, then turn it on with the Command-Option-P-R keys (all of them) held down. Hold the keys down til it bongs a couple of times, then release and it should boot normally from floppy. Rick On Sunday, June 13, 2004, at 05:51 AM, matt-land.com wrote: On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, Rick_Thomas wrote: It seems I have one of those non-bootable machines you speak of. After the installer (v3.0) finished, the machine never booted. Booting from a floppy nolonger works either. Any way I can boot from a floppy? Yes, I had the same issue with one of the machines which had some environment variables changed in the open firmware. cmd-opt-P-R fixed it (you will have to boot from floppy and re-run the quik setup). Ralf -- Ralf Schlatterbeck email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] FAX: +43/2243/26465/23 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Sat, Jun 12, 2004 at 11:43:49AM +0200, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote: Now another problem surfaces: The hard-disk drive is only found sometimes when booting woody from floppy. With MacOS there is no problem. Anybody seen this, is a cure available? Maybe the disk is not spun up? There are two scsi controllers on the motherboard of a 7600. The one that has an external connector is an ncr53c94, but the one that the internal drives normally use is a custom chip called mesh. The linux driver for the ncr53c94 is much more reliable, since it is actually a well documented chip. You might want to try switching which internal connector the internal drives are using. In particular, I remember some people having problems with any drive with SCSI id 0 on the mesh controller. You will lose some speed by using the other controller, and it will show up at a different path in OF, but it should work better. Brad Boyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Sat, 2004-06-12 at 05:43, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote: The best way I've found to boot OldWorld Macs is with BootX, a little I already mentioned, that MacOS is not an option. I want to donate the whole disk to Linux and I'm unsure about the licensing: I inherited these boxes with a MacOs 8.6 installed but I don't have any boot-disks. So I want a Linux-only solution... As Brad explained, getting OldWorld Macs to boot Linux reliably without any reference at all to MacOS is difficult at best. The boot loader you need to become familiar with is called quik. I have two completely Apple Free Macs running Linux and booting with quik. I used to have a problem because (on both of them) the battery that powered the NVRAM was old and weak. Consequently, the Open Firmware parameter settings kept getting zapped back to factory defaults every time the main power would fail. This prevented quik from booting until I manually re-set the OF parameters to what quik expected. As a workaround, I constructed a bootable MacOS zip disk that I could boot in emergencies with a program to reset the OF parameters. Eventually, I figured out what was causing the problem, and replaced the batteries. The machines have been pretty reliable ever since. So it can be done. However, you need to keep in mind that quik is very brittle -- it breaks easily -- and when it does it leaves you with a non-bootable machine. Fortunately for you, Apple has made MacOS System 7.5.3 available for free download, and your PowerMac 7600 machines is compatible with System 7.5.3. I'd strongly recommend that you install MacOS 7.5.3 on a 100 MB zip disk (It will fit with plenty of room to spare) and keep it around, just for emergencies. Hope this helps! Rick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
Reset (zap) the PRAM. Turn the power off, then turn it on with the Command-Option-P-R keys (all of them) held down. Hold the keys down til it bongs a couple of times, then release and it should boot normally from floppy. Rick On Sunday, June 13, 2004, at 05:51 AM, matt-land.com wrote: On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, Rick_Thomas wrote: On Sat, 2004-06-12 at 05:43, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote: However, you need to keep in mind that quik is very brittle -- it breaks easily -- and when it does it leaves you with a non-bootable machine. It seems I have one of those non-bootable machines you speak of. After the installer (v3.0) finished, the machine never booted. Booting from a floppy nolonger works either. Any way I can boot from a floppy? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 13:16, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote: Hello, I recently inherited several (4) oldworld 7600 Powermacs, one of them 132MHz, the others 120. I have successfully installed woody on one of them using a boot floppy. The floppy booting is a *very* erroneous process, I was usually successful booting from a floppy only after 5-6 tries. In addition two of the macs have defective floppy drives and I don't want starting swapping drives. Also once the mac-OS is gone, the boot floppies don't seem to boot anymore? So this is not a viable option, especially since I don't have any mac-OS disks to restart a system that doesnt have mac-OS on the hard drive. So I think there must be a better way to boot these beasts into a d-i. I'd really like to contribute my experience with these machines back if I can get some pointers... Hi! Ralf, Try getting a floppy drive cleaning kit. (They may be available at your local office supply store if you can't find them at a computer supply store. You may have to try a couple of places because they are no longer big-selling items and a lot of places have dropped them from inventory.) The business part of a drive cleaning kit looks like a 3.3-inch floppy but it has a soft fiber disk inside rather than one made of oxide coated mylar. They usually have a bottle of cleaning fluid that you're supposed to put a few drops of on the fiber disk before running the cleaning procedure. Don't be afraid to use it two or three times on an old floppy drive that is badly gummed up with dust and crud. You'll see a marvelous improvement in the error rate in the boot-from-floppy process. The best way I've found to boot OldWorld Macs is with BootX, a little program that runs under MacOS and loads a Linux kernel and (optionally) a compressed initial-ram-disk image, then passes control to the kernel. It's available from Ben Herrenschmidt, the author, at http://penguinppc.org/~benh/BootX_1.2.2.sit It requires that you have MacOS installed as the primary boot system, but you can get away with significantly less than 100 MB of disk dedicated to this if you use MacOS 7.5.3, which is available for free download from Apple at http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/ All 19 floppy images of it! An alternative URL for this is: http://igsi.tripod.com/mac/index753.htm Enjoy! Rick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 07:16:08PM +0200, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote: The floppy booting is a *very* erroneous process, I was usually successful booting from a floppy only after 5-6 tries. The floppy driver in OF 1.0.5 doesn't have very good error handling. It chokes on the slightest errors, even if the MacOS can read every bit. One thing that sometimes helps is to only use freshly formatted floppies. Also once the mac-OS is gone, the boot floppies don't seem to boot anymore? So this is not a viable option, especially since I don't have any mac-OS disks to restart a system that doesnt have mac-OS on the hard drive. The problem here is that once you setup quik (bootloader) in Linux, it changes to OF config to boot directly from the hard drive, which prevents it from doing the normal search for bootable devices. The problem is that the search is actually done by the Apple ROM (/AAPL,ROM in OF), which is the default boot device. They didn't fix this until the version of OF found in newworld models. What I've achieved so far: - Booting into open firmware prompt with a serial line The 7600 actually supports doing OF on the internal video and ADB keyboard fairly well. However, it's likely to start up in some unusual video settings, so you need a good monitor. Just set the input-device to 'kbd' and the output-device to '/chaos/control'. - Booting a self-compiled kernel off my internal network using bootp. I've probably set up everything correctly on the server side (I've successfully done a woody network install with an X86 based IBM X31 laptop with a similar server-side dhcp/tftpd setup) but the open firmware won't start the kernel. According to messages it initializes text and data segment but fails on bss. Looks like the BSD people are able to boot oldworld via network, I'd really like to do this with linux, too. Note that a COFF instead of ELF kernel is needed for this to work. This used to work. In fact, network booting worked before hard drives. My questions: - What magic incantations are needed for making open firmware 1.0.5 boot a linux image across the network? I seem to recall that it was pretty picky about the bootp server. Of course, you also need a COFF image. The netbsd folks have some pretty good info about network boots. Take a look at some of the boot related sections of http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html for more details, including things like some of the syntax quirks of older models (and the 7600 is one of the oldest with OF). Just remember that you'll want vmlinux.coff anywhere they talk about ofwboot.xcf. - What magic incantation do I need for building a kernel (or are there pre-built COFF Kernels available for Debian sarge?) It used to just work. The kernel build process can build a vmlinux.coff, though from the complaints I've seen on some of the lists recently, I wouldn't be surprised if that got broken. It doesn't get used much. - Or is there some magic for booting from CDROM with open firmware 1.0.5? I don't think OF 1.0.5 is capable of booting directly from a CDROM. I never saw any evidence of it, and I'm sure someone would have gotten it to work if it was possible. The way to boot Linux from a CDROM on an oldworld Mac is with miboot, which is also what the Debian boot floppies use (I think). The image with miboot looks like a normal copy of MacOS to the ROM, but it then proceeds to load a Linux kernel and boot it. The only problem is that while you only need an HFS filesystem with miboot for a floppy, you need drivers to write to the CDROM with miboot in order to make a bootable CD. Commercial Linux vendors use a commercial driver (available with Toast and other similar products), but we can't do that. There is enough information available from Apple to write an open source driver, but since this would be about the only use of it, noone has done it. - Pointers to additional sources of information welcome. Well, the netbsd.org page has a lot more info about OF on these old boxes than any Linux page. If you search on Apple's developer site, there is a reasonable amount of info about OF and some of the older boot methods, but I'm not sure how helpful that would be. I'm not sure if it goes back far enough, but you may find something useful in the old linuxppc mailing list archives. Take a look at http://lists.linuxppc.org/ for that. If you can find a decent archive of the old linux-pmac list, that would be old enough to go back to when everyone had to deal with this crap, because bootx and miboot didn't exist yet, and there was only OF 1.0.5 in PCI powermacs. Brad Boyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Sat, Jun 12, 2004 at 02:40:14AM -0400, Rick_Thomas wrote: Try getting a floppy drive cleaning kit. [...] Don't be afraid to use it two or three times on an old floppy drive that is badly gummed up with dust and crud. You'll see a marvelous improvement in the error rate in the boot-from-floppy process. Thanks for the Tip. I have found out now, that swapping drives is really easy. One of the four drives is in better shape than the others and I can get a more-or-less reliable boot with them. Now another problem surfaces: The hard-disk drive is only found sometimes when booting woody from floppy. With MacOS there is no problem. Anybody seen this, is a cure available? Maybe the disk is not spun up? I have not tried the sarge installer yet. The best way I've found to boot OldWorld Macs is with BootX, a little I already mentioned, that MacOS is not an option. I want to donate the whole disk to Linux and I'm unsure about the licensing: I inherited these boxes with a MacOs 8.6 installed but I don't have any boot-disks. So I want a Linux-only solution... Ralf -- Ralf Schlatterbeck email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] FAX: +43/2243/26465/23 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
Hello, I recently inherited several (4) oldworld 7600 Powermacs, one of them 132MHz, the others 120. I have successfully installed woody on one of them using a boot floppy. The floppy booting is a *very* erroneous process, I was usually successful booting from a floppy only after 5-6 tries. In addition two of the macs have defective floppy drives and I don't want starting swapping drives. Also once the mac-OS is gone, the boot floppies don't seem to boot anymore? So this is not a viable option, especially since I don't have any mac-OS disks to restart a system that doesnt have mac-OS on the hard drive. So I think there must be a better way to boot these beasts into a d-i. I'd really like to contribute my experience with these machines back if I can get some pointers... What I've achieved so far: - Booting into open firmware prompt with a serial line - Booting a self-compiled kernel off my internal network using bootp. I've probably set up everything correctly on the server side (I've successfully done a woody network install with an X86 based IBM X31 laptop with a similar server-side dhcp/tftpd setup) but the open firmware won't start the kernel. According to messages it initializes text and data segment but fails on bss. Looks like the BSD people are able to boot oldworld via network, I'd really like to do this with linux, too. Note that a COFF instead of ELF kernel is needed for this to work. My questions: - What magic incantations are needed for making open firmware 1.0.5 boot a linux image across the network? - What magic incantation do I need for building a kernel (or are there pre-built COFF Kernels available for Debian sarge?) - Or is there some magic for booting from CDROM with open firmware 1.0.5? - Anybody out there who has successfully booted Linux (even better, Debian) on oldworld powermac via network or CDROM? Also without Macos being installed? - Pointers to additional sources of information welcome. Please also reply to me personally, I'm not subscribed to the lists. Thanks, Ralf -- Ralf Schlatterbeck email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] FAX: +43/2243/26465/23 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
