Subject: linux info
Date: Saturday, December 22, 2001 11:12 PM

Subject:  6400/6500 Linux users--help


Author:
Endymion
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Date Posted: 17:49:17 12/22/01 Sat

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Okay I have had a year-long and somewhat sordid history with Linux on my
6400 and 6500 now and having sufficiently familiarised myself with the
process (installation and basic use) I am trying to organise things for
a good installation but I am running into some real troubles.

Linux PPC: Linux PPC seems to me to be the most "generic" of the Linux
distributions for the Mac. As such, it worked for me. I just installed
it, with no real problem, and there it was. This is almost the only good
thing that I found about Linux PPC. Everything else was a big pain in
the butt. Linux PPC uses Gnome for the X-desktop. I found that even when
using a 3dfx Voodoo 4 graphics card, Linux PPC was slow with Gnome so I
switched to KDE. This was much faster and KDE seems to be the more
"Mac-like" of the graphical desktops, but I still had problems. I
couldn't for the life of me switch resolutions, even after modifying the
XFree86 config, and this of course also means that I could not switch
colour depth either. I was eternally locked at 640x480 at 60Hz with only
256 colours. After struggling with Linux PPC for a week I found
something even more troubling: if I ever started the Mac without the
Sonnet extension enabled, Linux PPC was unbelievably slow. Turning the
extension back on sped things up a great deal... but "speeding things up
a great deal" actually meant that it was just workable. I never felt
like Linux PPC was freeing me from a lot of the constraints that hold
back super-high speeds like the Mac OS does. The worst part was that
Linux PPC 2000Q4, which was released almost as soon as I bought the CDs
last year, has not been updated even once since then. So I left Linux
PPC behind.

Next up I moved to Yellow Dog Linux 2.0. The install went well but for
whatever reason (I think I did not supply tdfx video parameters in BootX
on retrospect) I could only get the text installer, not the graphical
one. The install procedure was much faster than Linux PPC and much more
understandable and user-friendly. I thought that I had found a real Mac
distribution of Linux, until at the very end of the installation, I got
a message about there being "no network device." This I found curious. I
had removed the Geoport modem long long ago so that slot is emptyon the
6400 I used, but it did have an external modem connected. Was it looking
for an ethernet card? Anybody know? Well at any rate, after restarting
this installation and moving through BootX, I found that X could never
start. At the point where the X login should have come up, the text
screen blanks, after a few flashes of light it came back up, showing a
list of several resolutions all of which failed. Again, I tried editing
the X86config file with the help of an intel Linux junkie and couldn't
get anything going. I even reinstalled Yellowdog Linux after
reformatting my SCSI disk and wound up with the same results. I am now
trying to work with Yellowdog Linux 2.1 on my 6500 with a Voodoo 3 2000,
and that seems to be working differently. I did read extensively about
the use of the Voodoo driver for acceleration and proper configuration
of the Voodoo cards since my first attempt with 2.0 (for anybody
interested, here's the site
http://v.favrenicolin.free.fr/linuxppc/linuxppc-tdfx.php3), and mostly
it looks like you just need to supply the video under kernel arguments.
video=tdfx:1024x768-32@60 would give me proper video with the 2.2 kernel
and video=tdfx:1024x768@60,noaccel gave me proper video under the 2.4
kernel, BUT, the installer for YDL would flash blue and then "freeze,"
the AGREE/DISAGREE to the EULA notice would be as far as the installer
could get. So it looks like I am stonewalled with YDL now until I figure
this one out. AND, the thing that has me totally peeved is that unlike
the 2.0 installation (which I made on my 6400 w/240 Sonnet & Voodoo 4),
I cannot get YDL 2.1 to install on my 6500 w/400 Sonnet and Voodoo 3.
For that matter, I can't get it to install YDL 2.0 on the same Mac,
either. Anybody think this is a 6500 issue? Better yet, anybody
installed YDL 2.0/2.1 on a 6500 with similar config?

After the above failures I used my DSL line at work to download Linux
Mandrake 8.0 for PPC after hours at the office. I could easily burn the
ISO found through their FTP mirror using Windows Nero burner and
everything is recognised as a Mac CD. The CD boots from my Yosemite so I
know everything should work on the CD end, but I do not want to use
Linux with my Yosemite right now but rather my 6400 and 6500, so I am
back in Memphis and bring the Mandrake install CDs with me and try to
get Mandrake to start. Just as with the YDL 2.1 installation, I used my
video argument to the kernel (video=tdfx:1024x768-32@60, with ,noaccel
at the end when I try the 2.4 installation), and UNLIKE the others this
one works, BEAUTIFULLY so, the Linux Mandrake graphical installer looks
almost as lovely as an Apple made Mac installer and everything is clear
and easy to understand, BUT, I cannot get Mandrake install to start by
using the kernels supplied by Mandrake! To make a long story short I had
to use the YDL kernels I had from my 2.0/2.1 CDs, and those worked.

AND, just like the YDL install, I had to start up my Mac with the Sonnet
extension OFF!

This is really starting to bug me, I have installed Be much simpler and
easier than this with the Sonnet extension on for nice and fast speed in
the Be environment. At some point in my YDL 2.0 attempts, I turned to
using Powerlogix G3 software. I read somewhere that the Powerlogic cache
utility needs to send G3 information to BootX, so that BootX tells the
Linux kernel that "this Mac is a G3 so use the G3" instead of the
603e(v) CPU. But any time I have the Sonnet extension ON for Mac OS
startup, I CANNOT start into Linux through any kernel (other than Linux
PPC, which I have decided to abandon). What happens during those
instances is when the startup gets to the ATA/IDE profile, it says "hda:
lost interrupt," and repeats about 20-25 times, which looks to me
like... it can't find an ATA/IDE hard disk device? But eventually it
finds ATA/IDE hard disk partitions and changes slightly, "hda1: lost
interrupt," and goes on down the list til it seems to find something and
moves on with the hda info, then zips into a text-spewing frenzy such
that I cannot hope to read everything before it starts to try to launch
X, but that never happens.

I know there must be lots of 6400 and 6500 Linux users but I cannot find
any of them who have the Sonnet G3s to get information on how they do
this install. If I were feeling gutsy I would just turn off the Sonnet
extension and then install Linux Mandrake, and then worry about trying
to enable the G3 in Linux later, but after my bad (slow) experience with
a non-G3 powered Linux PPC I am not anxious to experience this again
(seriously, Linux PPC ran so slow with the G3 off that I had to wait 30
seconds or longer for a menu to open up just so I could quit out of
Linux!).

So I have posted to the Linux PPC, YDL, Mandrake, and even the
xlr8yourmac.com forums but nobody there has any answer. If you've read
this far and don't know much about Linux let me reassure you, I don't
know much either, a lot of what I was saying just then might sound Greek
to you but it is just from experience that I am parroting back. I think
if I am going to get some real help that actually enables my 6400 or
6500 (preferably both) into the Linux world it is going to come from
6400 and 6500 users like those on this board who actually still care
about these Macs.

Sooooooooooo, anybody got any other experiences or ideas to share? HAS
anybody successfully installed these distributions on a 6400/6500 with a
Sonnet G3?