Like the title explains, evidently I'm supposed to use BootX, the oldworld Mac bootloader as even though the Lombard is a new world machine, its vid card wasn't supported in yaboot, although I may be wrong, I don't know the ages of the pages I've been checking.

Also, this thing seems to have a Linux partition on it, LinuxPPC, is that yellowdog?

I also can't seem to get to the openfirmware at all... grumble grumble, Option, Command, F, O right? Where command is that silly open apple key thingy?

The install media is Mandy 8.2 PPC

Well, x86, Sparc32 and 64, and now this little headache...

Cheers,

Finegan

I was right about the trick to get to the open firmware, but its a bit of a headache: you have to hit Control, Open Apple, O, F all during the boot chime, and sometimes it doesn't bother to work and requires a screwdriver stab to the microscopic reset button. When Open firware appears, the command is usually:

boot hd:XX,yaboot

assuming of course that yaboot resides on the / of that partition.

Then there were 4 horked ancient kernels from back in the beta days of the atyfb framebuffering device, so I compiled my own 2.4.19, with gcc 2.95.2 nonetheless! Everything works fine now minus the mouse... I enabled all the adbgoop and still can't figure out what the mouse device is...

Cheers,

Finegan

Alright Fin, here's what I read:

You have some sort of Mac. Looks to be maybe a laptop type. Maybe sorta new, judging from the G3 (though I have no idea when they came out, but I hear about G4's now so G3's can't be that old is what I am thinking). And you see that there is linux on the book (who knows how, maybe you were told this when you got the notebook) and are trying to access it to see what distro/kernel is residing, as well as any leftover files/programs that may be cool simply for nestalgic purposes.

The problem is trying to get the thing to boot into the linux partition. It's hard to use alot of the floppy distros, rescue distros, because there isn't alot of support for anything but x86 arch. You have a distro that supports it (it being PPC right?), but now you are figuring out how to get the BIOS to open up so you can change the boot sequence.

Today you figured it out, and was in the process of figuring out how to get the correct lines to tell the bootloader where to boot. Once you got that down, you got in, found an ancient kernel, written mostly using hieroglyphics. And then you interpreted these writings, and built GCC 2.95 on the box. Using gcc 2.95.2 you were able to build a custom kernel 2.4.19 series. Amazingly enough, everything is working fine, minus the mouse.

Was I close?

You are amazing Fin! After all that, I am betting the mouse will be a snap for you, it's probably something little holding you back from getting it to work as well.

Good luck

Cool

Actually its kinda old, 99-ish, 450Mhz, and gcc 2.95.2 was what was onboard, and I eventually cheated and yanked a USB mouse from a crate here at work, but yeah... that's more or less right. Except for the amazing part... blind, bloody, stupid persistence is more like it.

Now, let's see what's on this thing.

Cheers,

Finegan

Yeah, but if you weren't a die hard Guru, you wouldn't have yanked a USB, you'd have hunted down a PS2 because you wouldn't be to sure on how to get the USB one going... It's the little things you gurus take for granted that make you gurus.

Cool

Oh... I get it:

tty switching: CTRL+Open apple, *pause*, Function+F-key... oh yeah, that was #$^&-in obvious!

USB mouse doesn't work either and I can't get GPM to compile, craptacular.

Cheers,

Finegan

You mean like how Macs have never had PS/2 ports?

Bring me Steve Jobs, 20 pounds of salmon, and a bucket full of magnets!

I looked around for a floppy distro for this thing for a while too, until I realized that it didn't have a floppy.

I'm having issues with pcmcia too, this odd mix of vintage compilers and glibc's and gpms hobbled together with the brand new kernels and the pcmcia-cs source is making for a wacko kazoo mess.

If you ever wanted to try out Linux on a Mac, may I recommend something slightly more enticing, like smashing all of the bones in your hand to powder with a ball peen hammer.

And as for Mac's famed performance, okay this little 12Gb drive rocks the house, but with 400Mhz (just checked) of clock and 256MB of RAM, this thing takes nearly half an hour on a kernel compile... I got my Stinkpad 500Mhz 128MB machine down to 11 minutes. Pokey Mac... Of course, I do have a 3.4 MB kernel image. Hmmm...

Cheers,

Finegan

Oh yeah, I am thinking I read somewhere that IBM made the ps/2 standard, so I guess if that's correct, then that would explain it...

Good luck going on further...