Re: Beige PowerMac G3/266 trouble

On 2006-04-19, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yes, I did see those settings. I tried copying the "append" settings
into the kernel command line, and also giving BootX the RAM disk size as
per the "initrd-size" setting, but that didn't make any difference that
I could see. (Remember I can't use yaboot itself, as that's
New-World-only.)

Hmm, I can't seem to remember how I did that when I first installed the
box two years ago. In some book I read they made the remark that setting
up *nix systems was some kind of black art and that it is said that the
sysadmins sometimes even have to speak a few magic words to get it up
and running - I remember that it was an old book (late 70s or early
80s), but they seem to have a point ;)

I'm beginning to suspect a problem with BootX not loading things
properly into RAM.

I remember that I used to fiddle with initrd images as well (on an older
machine with only 32 MB of RAM, initrd was a no-go thing). I believe I
copied the stuff to a 100 MB zip disk (external SCSI model) and used
that as root. Installation might have required some shell intervention
(setting up swap space by hand early in the process), but it worked.
Might have been on a different distro, though. Anyway, if you've got the
hardware, that's usually a quick thing you can try - but don't forget to
modify the fstab if there's one on the initrd image or it'll call you
ugly things... ;)

BootX is usually pretty good at booting the machine in my experience,
but it might get confused by some MacOS extension (I seem to recall
having read something, but I'm not sure), so maybe you could try again
with extensions disabled.

Have you tried miboot? I copied the miboot image onto a floppy, and it
did boot my Mac, but I wasn't sure how to configure it or anything. Time
to study more source, I guess...

I tried miboot once, but it was on a different system (a NuBUS-based
machine with a 601 processor, I forgot the model), and miboot was way to
new for it, so I had to stick with the Apple MkLinux booter on that
machine. Compared to BootX, the MkLinux booter is really ugly; it might
be worth a try though, even if they need a strange header in front of
the kernel image; and initrd has to become a real fs on a real device,
if I remember correctly... Requires quite a bit of tweaking to make
things work. By the way, the MkLinux booter does also boot more modern
kernels which are not mach-based as the first ones for NuBus machines
were, just in case you read any old docs on the net which say
differently.

I've got another idea: strictly speaking, I didn't install debian sarge
back then, I installed woody and upgraded to sarge only later. So you
might try to install the woody base system only and upgrade that to sarge
(which would have been amazingly painless on my system if I hadn't
upgraded glibc by compiling it from the newest and greatest sources;
after removing the new self-compiled version, things worked like a
charm ;). Only then you would try to install the other packages you
wish to have on your machine.

Anyway, don't lose your patience with it - when the box eventually
works, it's a nice workhorse one can rely on.

Manuel
--
Homepage: http://www.hinterbergen.de/mala
OpenPGP: 0xA330353E (DSA) or 0xD87D188C (RSA)
.

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