Subject: Initial impressions
From: Tovar (tvr@usermail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 25 2001 - 08:24:19 MDT
[This was initially in response to a posting to the Debian PowerPC list,
edited slightly for this list.]
As noted, alas, it even seems to care about 2.4.x kernels as well [as the
2.2.x kerkels] somehow?? I tried each of the current RPM's (via 'alien')
and none of them would work for me. Usually they would get module undef's.
So it ended up compiling from most recent source from the MOL site.
Getting the most recent source to compile was non-trivial. I had to install
several packages to do so (i think they were libelf-dev, libgd1g-dev and
binutils-dev, and there might be more, since i'd already gotten enough to
try to generate boot floppies). There were no hints to what packages were
needed in BUILDING and the errors manifested mostly as missing 'include'
files. A few things had to changed by hand, such as the location of the
current kernel (or of XMON), to get it to compile [mol-0.9.57/Rules.make
and also, respectively, added a -I to mol-0.9.57/debugger/mon/Makefile].
There may have been a few other little details, but that was 3am-ish (with
me in normal day-phase), so i don't remember well what they were.
I have an OF-only video card (ix3D) and i found that build of MOL to be very
finicky about having video parameters right. Come up at the wrong resolution
or pixel depth and it dies in unhelpful ways. It seems to have various other
reliability issues with my configuration which i will cover at a later time.
One major bother for me was that mol-0.9.57 doesn't handle the MacOS dialog
window which notifies you about repairing your disk. That can be turned off
via the 'General' control panel (as explained in said dialog if you boot up
with MacOS). The dialog came up completely blank about 95% of the time (with
the remaining case having drawn a small fraction of its window frame).
Another quirk is that it starts up on the last HFS partition rather than the
more common MacOS choice of the first such partition. But these partitions
can be named explicitly in '/etc/molrc. Coming up in the last HFS partition
had a rather humorous result of having MOL trying to boot LINUX from inside
LINUX... [I use a copy of an HFS boot floppy in its own partition on my
hard disk instead of using 'quik'.]
I didn't get finished trying to get the networking working [it works now],
nor getting audio out of it (other than the start-up sound). But i was
surprised and delighted to have the three AppleShare icons from my i686
Debian box appear on my MOL desktop. Running MOL under X is fun, but i
as just a slight bit disappointed that 'startmol' from the i686 produced
a screen on a virtual terminal rather than my non-local X screen, but hey,
you can't have everything... [I've now set 'use_backing_store' in 'molrc']
It's amazing it works as well it does!!
So it can be built from sources, but you either need to be experienced at
building/porting, or have someone patient nearby who's willing to help. So
right now, i wouldn't recommend this approach to newcomers [using Debian,
where most dependencies are handled carefully]. Nonetheless, it seem like
a tremendous program which should be VERY useful to me once i can address
its reliability issues.
-- Tovar
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed Apr 25 2001 - 08:26:20 MDT