Missing Sheep and other errors

[Brian Wood]

I've been trying to get MOL working with Yellowdog 4.0.1 on a "rev. A" 
iMac with not too much success.

The first problem is that the "sheep" module appears to be missing. It 
is not in the mol or the mol-kmods package and a notation in the source 
RPM says that "sheep_net has been removed from the distribution because 
it is dynamically created", whatever that means.

Even if I do not use the sheep interface (comment it out in molrc.net) I 
still get problems. "Startmol" opens an X window and the tun0 interface 
gets set up and receives an address from the dhcp server, then things 
just stop. I have to CTRL-C a few times to get out.

If I try "startmol -X" I get further, it loads sound drivers and reads 
the blockdevs and then fails on a bootloader SyncRead error (there is no 
OS-X installation on the disk, I just tried "-X"  to see what happened). 
"Startmol --linux also gets much further, I actually see the penguin 
hugging the apple but it errors out on an open BIOS bootloader failure, 
which is correct as I have not set up Linux to load. I just want to run 
9.2.2 in a window under Linux, which is what mol is supposed to do.

The regular "startmol" does not get even as far as reading the disk, 
however. It stops before I even see the sound driver messages but, as I 
said, the tun0 interface is set up.

So, I'm not sure if the "missing sheep" problem is related to the 
failure to get past the tun0 setup or not, but it is a problem as sheep 
should be there. I've never heard of a module being "dynamically 
created" but there's always a first time.

I saw a reference here from a while back (November 2004) to recent 
versions of libpng being a problem. I retrogressed my libpng back to 
1.2.5 from the 1.2.8 that was installed, as suggested, but this made no 
difference. (I did re-boot to make sure I wasn't using a cached copy of 
the newer lib.)

The system is a 233Mhz. "rev. A" iMac with 256Mb. RAM, a 30Gb. HDD, 
Yellowdog 4.0.1 updated with yum to be current. The MacOS installation 
on the HDD is 9.2.2 in a 4Gb. HFS partition (below the 8Gb. limit) and 
runs just fine when booted from yaboot. I have run molvconfig and 
startmol --keyconfig. HFS and HFS plus support are in my kernel. The 
MacOS partition is *not* mounted when I startmol. The mol module loads 
with no complaints about version mis-match, I do not have to use -a. The 
forwarding/gatewaying/routing gets set up properly and the firewall is 
not operating. I tried re-building the source RPM for 0.9.71, applying 
an "alloc" patch from the YDL list, but that made no difference. I tried 
compiling the 0.9.70 source tarball (latest I could find) but that failed.

I finally stripped the machine and re-installed YDL and MacOS from 
scratch, so I have a pristine installation which *should* work, but does 
not.

The time has come to ask for help.
Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated. This is driving me crazy :-)