Mac-on-Linux?

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 25 February 2005 19:15, Joshua Wehner wrote:
> Well... That did something.
>
> I did have start_on_console set to *no*. So, that confused me a bit.
> But, I changed auto_switch_console from "yes" to "no" and voila! I got
> Mac-On-Linux in a itty-bitty window on my desktop.
>
> However, the window was wonky. MOL never actually started; I didn't see
> the Penguin-hugging logo. The desktop clip wasn't "live" - heck, the
> window wasn't "live": whatever moved in front of that window (other
> windows, menus, etc) got stuck there.
>
> So, on a whim, I tried "startmol -X". I got a similar size window, with
> a logo and a button that said "The current video mode/resolution is
> unsupported by your X settings" (or something like that, it flipped by
> pretty quick). mol then shutdown, saying "no bootable drives" (which is
> probably accurate, I have no bootable OS X drive).
>
> Okay... So, I tried to change the color depth, I set it to 16 and tried
> plain "startmol" again. I got a different-size window (looks 640x ish
> to me) but it's plain grey, and nothing happens.
>
> With the color depth set to 16 (or 8, or any other random value I've
> tried), I get the following:
>
> - with "startmol" - a large (640x ish) window that's grey the whole
> time. "startmol" throws errors about sheep, then seems to switch to TUN
> and assigns an IP. That's the last message before I exit.
>
> - with "startmol -X" - a large window appears, starts grey, turns blue,
> then disappears shortly after. In the console, there are errors about
> not having a bootable disk.
>
> - I've also tried this with --cdboot (with an 8.6 OS CD in the drive)
> but nothing changes from the above. Results are the same as without
> "--cdboot".
>
>
> I feel like I'm getting closer, though!
>
>
I haven't followed this thread from the beginning, so I don't know which 
machine you are trying this all on.

One thing to check, is whether you should copy a MacOS rom to your Mac OS 8.6 
system folder.

Some explanation:

Since you installed Mac OS 8.6, I presume your system is Old World. This means 
that for booting, the system has access to a ROM chip in your machine. 
Contrary to this are New World macs, that don't have such a chip. Instead, 
they have a file called Mac OS ROM (or something like that) in their system 
folder. Without this ROM (either as a chip, or as a file in the system 
folder), Mac OS can't boot. This is important.

Now when Mac OS gets installed on an old world machine, it detects the chip, 
and hence won't install the ROM file.

The tricky part now, is that MOL emulates a New World machine, and so in order 
to start the Mac OS, the ROM file is required in the system folder.

If you installed MacOS directly from the Mac OS Install CD, and not via MOL, 
this ROM file would not be there as explained before. So you get a virtual 
New World machine unable to boot the Mac OS that is loaded into it.

Now not to worry, if the Mac OS installer doesn't install the ROM file, you 
can still do it manually:

Look on this page:
http://www.maconlinux.org/download.html

You will find here a utility Tome Viewer (works under Mac OS, not Linux), and 
a file called Mac-OS-ROM-Update-1.0 from which you can extract a ROM file 
(with Tome Viewer), suitable to be used with Mac OS 8.6.

Try to install this, and see what happens.

Good luck,

Geert Jan