FW: Yellow Dog 3.0 installation from CD problem

[Mike Haase]

In a nutshell, when I go to bootx, select the ramdisk, select the boot image
and click on "LINUX", I get the "loading advansys scsi driver" screen, and
then the starting X notes at the bottom of the screen, and finally the
Yellowdog Installation Dialog appears.  But, the window it is displayed in
is normal height but half the width of the terminal screen.  The text is
unreadable!

History:
I had previously downloaded and burned cds from the 20030325 disk1 through
disk3.  I was able to install YDL 3.0 from those disks.  But-there were a
few anomolies where RPMs would not install.  So I figured that the disk
images were probably corrupted.

I md5sum'ed the iso's and they proved to be ok.  I dd'd the cds back to iso
images and md5sum'ed them.  Disks 2 and 3 were ok but there seemed to be a
discrepancie in disk 1.  I noticed that a newer image of disk 1 was
available and downloaded it, burned it to cd, and made sure the md5sum of
the iso was ok and that an iso created from the burned cd was ok too.  So it
looked to be good to go.

Since I am pretty sure the new image is ok and the old one was not, I also
replaced the ramdisk image, and linux image, etc. on my OS 9.1 disk.  So I
felt pretty sure that life was sweet.  But the problem above has surfaced.
Very disapointing.

Analyisis:
By switching screens (CTL-ALT+[1,2,3,4,7]) I got to a command prompt (1).  A
ps shows that there are a number of install related processes running
including X.  X uses a config file located in /tmp.  I think its
/tmp/XF86Config.temp.  So X is using fbdev and the montior is apparantly the
right v/h hz settings.  The modes are 1240x768x[8|12|16|24|15] bits with the
default color of 15 bits.  (15 bit default???? Maybe thats why the color is
so hosed).  Did I mention that the colors are hosed?  Yeah.

So by looking [and looking...and...] on the web I see that the parameters to
the bootx (boot parameters) include the possiblity of setting the frame
buffer device as in
    video=fbdev:vmode:12,cmode:24
and possibly
    video=vga
(although I have not tried that yet).

(basically the vmode mapps to a screen resolution (600x800) and hsync (75)
while the cmode is the number of bits of color (24).

I have tried to use this video=... but have had no visable success. Whatever
is setting the XF86Config.temp file up is determined to use 1024x768x15 and
70 hz.

Up untill last nite I thought that the problem might have been somehow
related to the Voodoo5 5500 card driving my 17" Sony monitor.  But, in
desperation, I put a VGA adaptor on the video port of the MAC 7500 and
plugged the monitor in there.  But same result!

So - here I sit thinking evil thoughts.  Here's one....

On most X displays you can cycle thorugh the modes using the +/- key and
some combination of control keys.  Since the XF86Config.temp file has
several modes I have tried to guess the right keys to cycle throught the
modes to find one that works but no joy there either.  (Any hints guys?)

And then I though - hey, I could just edit the XF86Config.temp file to get a
setup that has worked before (remember I did get YDL 3.0 running with X on
this self same hardware and have run YDL 2.0 on it since its release....).
If only I edit the config file and then do a CTL-E to restart the x-server.
Yeah - sounds good.  But, recall that the xserver was started (use ps -ef to
see) with a sting of options including "-terminate".  Without having looked
very far to see what that does, I suspect it is responsible for the
behaviour that follows entering CTL-E.  It hammers the x-server ok.  But
when X terminates it also starts shutting down the scripting that runst the
install.  So pretty soon you are looking at a message saying that "you can
safely reboot your computer".   So - lemmee ask you....when did microsoft
start supporting YDL?  Does this make sense to you?  What were they
thinking?


I found reference to mode switching on the web last nite.  Theoretically its
the CTL-ALT and the kepad +/- keys.  Gave that a shot but no joy there
either.

Browsed CD #1 and found some notes that suggest that one can put the phrase
"install-safe" into the boot parameter box of bootX to get the boot sequence
to boot in text mode.  I gave that a shot once and got the same X display as
before.  ( I went off to do something else more immediately rewarding and
did not try this a second time with close attention to spelling, .etc).

Found a note that suggested that putting "text" in the parameter box of
bootx would give a text based install.  Tried that a couple of times but the
installer insisted in using X.

Last night I pulled out my 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 card and used an apple monitor
on the mac 7500 build in apple video.  It worked fine.  Spun about 2.5GB of
RPMs off the three install CDs.  Mostly seemed to work fine.  I did not
reformat the / partition so there was some legacy stuff there that prooved
helpful down the road.  In the future I think I'll move stuff to /tmp that I
want to keep (usually /tmp is a separate partition) and nuke the /
partition.

But that does not seem to be the end of the story.  I found that even
putting the 3dfx card in the pci slot was sufficient to cause the install
process to get hosed up.

I eventally booted up and found that kudzu was hanging the boot proceedure.
So I did interactive boot (at least untill I tol kuduz not to run) and after
that the bootup went fine.  I edited /etc/X11/XF86Config a couple of times
before getting it right.  I was trying for a while to get both monitors
running but gave up, thinking that two heads that don't work are not better
than one that does.  So I stripped the XF86Config file down to just the 3dfx
card and the 17" SONY monitor.  Its been problem free.  Also looks good. :)

Sound seems to be a problem with KDE.  I found some notes on sound and,
after finding that they were somehow incomplete, poked around and found some
degree of satisfaction.   Basically there is some disconnect beteween KDE
and the old world macs.  You have to do a modprobe command with at least one
argument.  I'm not convinced I have it right but I believe its
modprobe dmasound_pmac.  There is another choice:  modprobe dmasound_core.
Neither by themselves turn the sound on as is claimed.  But after going to
the KDE control panel and toggleing the sound quality (number of bits, 8 or
16 or automatic) you can get sound back.  But you have to modprobe first.
The notes say you can put a "alias dmasound_pmac" in the
/etc/sysconfig.modules file and load dmasound_pmac at boot time but I have
not had that work.  KDE allways complains that the sound is not working.
Go figure.

And then there's kudzu.  It seems to just hang.  I fired it manually once
with the -s option and it seemed to behave ok.  It found my orange micro
card for USB and Firewire and configured it in /etc/sysconfig/hwconfig as
well as my orange micro grappler uw scsi card.  But, I gottat tell you that
somethig was eating a lot of cpu bandwidth after that.  So on that point too
I am not happy.

After running kudzu I also found that kdeinit seemed to die and logging out
and logging in only made it worse - the kdeinit would not start so there was
no window manager. PTHTHT.  Rebooting and not letting kudzu start seemed to
work around that.  So i'm thinking that maybe the right thing to do here is
not run kudzu at all.  I had put the "SAFE=no" into the /etc/sysconfig/kudzu
file which causes kudzu to be started with the -s option at boot time.  But
it hung there too.  So I'm not sure there is an easy way.  That's probably
going to put the smack-a-roo on my dreams of plugging in USB and Firewire
devices.  But thats another story.

By the way, I had YDL 2.0 running just fine out of a 2 Gb drive. And, after
I found out how to get the h/w cache turned on in YDL it was pretty
satisfactory as far as performance went.  But it did not run Xpilot very
well - graphics just too slow.  It looks like to me YDL 3.0 under KDE is
slower yet.  Almost unacceptably slow.  And it seems to eat a lot of memory.
Just putzing around it has 62 processes running.  My Windows 2000 server
running on my 300mhz PentiumII laptop only has about 50 processes when its
idling.  I would expect the 300mzh G3 in my power mac 7500 to be somewhat
crisper to use, but it isn't.  It compares very poorly to the 500Mhz Xeon
processor in a prolient sp700 workstation running red hat 7.3 I use at work.
Maybe it is that YDL works better on the newer G4s than on the old world
macs?

So - I have YDL 3.0 up and more or less runnig on a 7500 with a 300 MHZ G3
and 156 MB of memory and with a voodoo 5 and a scsi orange micro card (which
YDL does not see but os 9.1 does) and an orange micro USB+Firewire card
(which works under usb 1.1 with os 9.1 and is yet to be proven under YDL
3.0).  Generally its been way too much fun for me and I'll think twice
before using YDL again on old world macs. (You might apprectiate that the
next step in my little mind was to unzip and unompress the ramdisk image and
adjust the h/w database so that it recognized my monior and device and
recompress and re-zip the image.  But we've all been spared that). I'm
thinking way down deep that red hat 9.0 on a 900Mhz single or dual Xeon
would be real sweet and I'll just run os 9.1 on my mac.

I thought that I might try using Gnome instead of KDE (which I like very
much) as a desktop and, as installs ARE pretty painless, I stripped the
hardware back down to just the base plus the orange micro scsi controller,
plugged in my mac monitor to the processor and ran bootx again.
Whatta-you-know?  When X started it gave me the same half screen that I had
been seeing previously on the SONY monitor!   Not exactly confidence
building.