[K12OSN] Speaking of Macs

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

Jim Kronebusch wrote:
>> I'm a complete mac noob.  From what I've gleaned from the net the
>> particular box I have switches to serial port mode when doing that.  Not
>> one of apples brighter ideas.
>>
>> I have an old wyse terminal I can plug into the computer but have to
>> track down a cable first.  I was just hoping a simple boot floppy would
>> do the trick.
>>     
>
> I don't think you'll have much luck with booting one of the old clones.  I don't think
> those old power computing machines had an openfirmware that worked the same as the
> iMacs.    I tried booting the old apple G3 all-in-one machines before as well with no
> luck.  I think you need an iMac Bondi G3 or newer.  I know Chuck Liebow has booted the
> real old 52XX series (nubus macs) but that takes a ton of manual tweaks to accomplish.
>   

That's because the really old Macs didn't have OpenFirmware at all. 
Those are "OldWorld" machines that need something like BootX to boot
Linux (yaboot won't work).  Yellow Dog Linux used to have BootX up to at
least the v3.0 series.  Your clone likely is an OldWorld machine.  My
suggestion would be to grab an older version of Yellow Dog Linux, do a
minimal installation of it on this clone box (the bare basics + X11 is
all you need--i. e. no GNOME, no KDE, none of that stuff).  Then tell
X11 to do a XDMCP query at boot time (you can do that in
/etc/rc.d/rc.local).  This is how I did it on a Sun Ultra 5 box with Red
Hat Linux 6.2, as well as with a Power Mac 5500 with YDL 2.3.

Note that you probably will need at least 32MB DRAM for this to work at
all.  YDL on the Power Mac 5500 didn't like it too well when I had less
than 32MB DRAM in there, swap partition or no.

If it's a NuBus device, then you're in for some real work.  Like Chuck,
I too have done it with NuBus 5200's.  Once you figure out how to do it,
it's not that hard.  But that first time figuring out the details to
make it actually work is a pain.

--TP
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/attachments/20070321/d78e2d3a/attachment.htm>