G3 upgrade

[Dan A. Milisic]

I recently installed a G3/266+ZIFcarrier from OWC so I could go to the
Jaguar party with my 8600.  It was hard to go wrong at under USD $70,
even if it's a relatively modest speed bump.  

Upgrades to the box that worked well in YDL:

Generic PC-USB Controller (Opti, works fine in OS9/OSX too)
Promise ATA-100 controller (PDC20267)

These upgrades are very inexpensive as they're for the commodity PC
market, but work just fine under linux after a kernel recompile.  All
the PC BIOS on the controller card means is that you can't boot MacOS on
the IDE devices, no big deal for me.

What I did was load up the stock 4gb SCSI drive with BootX and OS9 (plus
Darwin using Xpostfacto on a separate SCSI drive).  With a recompiled
2.4.19 kernel and the stock ramdisk install image, YDL installer would
see both the IDE and SCSI bus, and the install was painfree.  BTW,
PowerMac MESH SCSI works reliably for me at 10MB/s as well (All the
pre-compiled kernels seem to have MESH set at 5MB/s)

Oldworld machines are a lot easier to install linux on these days, and
work really well with a bit of tweaking.  The on-board 'control' video
works well for me in 1280x1024x15bpp.  MESH SCSI has never been a
problem, but USB and external SCSI (53c94) has caused me trouble on
older kernels.  Dmasound_pmac works great, as does MACE ethernet.

About the only (very minor) annoyance I've seen is the USB mouse
disappearing on every second login when X starts in runlevel 5.  Change
to runlevel 3 (text login) and everything is 100%

HTH,
D.

BTW, All the 'other' PPC distros threw me into fits, thanks TerraSoft ;)
     

-----Original Message-----
From: yellowdog-newbie-admin@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
[mailto:yellowdog-newbie-admin@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com] On Behalf
Of Bert Knabe
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 11:36 PM
To: yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
Subject: Re: G3 upgrade



On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 03:01  PM, Matt Hanes wrote:

> At 03:40 PM 10/31/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>> Does anyone have experience of installing YDL or any type of linux
>> (gentoo,debian, etc) on a powerpc upgraded to a g3?
>
> I've done it a few times with no problems on both an upgraded 7500 and
> a PowerComputing machine. I had to install BootX on the Mac partiion 
> first because it wouldn't boot from the CD key, but that was my only 
> problem.
>
> This assume that all of my SCSI problems aren't associated with the
> upgrade cards.

They probably weren't. I couldn't get Yellowdog to install at all until 
I quit trying to install it on a SCSI drive. It installed without a 
hitch on an IDE drive.

Bert

--
Asking questions is never a sign of stupidity, it is a sign of 
ignorance seeking to be cured.

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