Solved Powermac g3: will it perform? [Solved]

[sossego]

I picked one up for $40 along with 2 p4 512M for an extra $40. (Pretty good considering that my last one died due to a surge.)
I've read that from 6.x, a g4 or greater was needed. Is this requirement still standing?

 

[winstonw]

should work

http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

"The FreeBSD/ppc port should run on any New-World machine (any Apple machine with a built-in USB port)."

This includes most G3 machines. Happy FreeBSD'ing .

 

[sossego]

It seems that the common response for any BSD flavor is to crash during ifconfig of bmac.

 

[winstonw]

It seems that the common response for any BSD flavor is to crash during ifconfig of bmac.

Try resetting your PRAM and NVRAM -- http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
Basically turn the mac on holding down Apple+Option+p+r and let it reboot several times with that combination still held down. I have been told it is best to do this at least twice.

A dmesg output would be useful as would be a backtrace: see the link below and the following sections in that book to learn how to get a backtrace.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug.html

Thanks!

 

[sossego]

I have the cd to be able to boot but it doesn't recognize the hard drive.
This next information may help someone recognize some of my problems.
NetBSD has trouble recognizing individual partitions. OpenBSD reads the disk as being in terabytes if the whole disk isn't used. Debian seems to be the only working system. I have read somewhere that making an hfs filesystem can be recognized by freebsd; yet, again, this poses a problem. The mac-fdsik does not allow such an option and the OpenBSD fdisk isn't allowing a freebsd a5 type to stay on the disk.

Openfirmware boot arguments

setenv boot-device cd:0

The bootloader comes up. See above for results and non results.

Apologies for talking in circles, my thought process is kind of jumbled.

 

[sossego]

This project is put on hiatus until I can find a working solution for fdisk.

 

[sossego]

As usual, I'm trying again after giving up.
Actually, I finally installed the system.
There are a few things that I would like to do and need to do before it can boot. Which file is the firmware loader? Is it boot1.hfs? This is for a dualboot with debian through the yaboot loader until there is enough confidence for a FreeBSD only install.

 

[winstonw]

booting

What happens at boot is the openfirmware program loads into the memory then either waits for commands or will automatically load a file from a harddisk partition formatted HFS or perhaps HFS+.

I learned much about the mac's booting process with NetBSD. Don't bother installing it and expecting it to be useful because it's ppc-specific console driver is horrid and it doesn't work with the generic console driver nor xorg so you don't get any keyboard input in other ttys including xorg.

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/partitioning.html skim this over
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/faq.html this too

 

[sossego]

I already have the FreeBSD installation on the disk.
I've mounted it with

#mkdir disk2
# mount -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 -o ro /dev/hdc5 disk2

I know that OpenBSD and Linux work. NetBSD gave me trouble.

 

[winstonw]

Glad you got it working .

Does sleep work by any chance?

 

[sossego]

The added howto comments are on the post about the snap release. It took me some time to get it right.
I haven't tried sleep. Mouse is enabled when you log in.

 

[sossego]

Anyone successfully build libxul or xulrunner on this architecture yet?
Also, any hints for qt4?