YDL 2.3 on a PowerMac 8600 ...

[Markus Deistler]

Hi,

Chuck Coleman wrote:

> I have heard of 2.3 working on some old world Mac's, especially the 8600/300
> and the 9600/300 and 350. But I haven't heard of  a lot of success in 2.3
> running on any other old world Mac.

I run YDL 2.3 on a PPC 7500 (601@100MHz, 112 MB RAM, the first PCI-based 
Powermac), and I haven't encountered any "YDL2.3"-specific problems. The 
prebuilt 2.4.19-kernel that comes with the YDL2.3-install-CD *does* 
support old world stuff (adb, serial ports, scsi-controler - internal 
mesh-controler, external 53c94-controler), but also includes all 
necessary new world drivers (usb, ide, firewire is available by a set of 
kernel modules). So I was even able to burn CDs on the Firewire-cdwriter 
that is connected to a PCI-Firewire/USB-card by simply loading the 
ohci1394-module.

That support-them-all-policy makes the kernel huge, so if I feel like 
compiling for several hours (at 100 MHz) I will build a customized 
kernel without "new world drivers."

There was a problem, but that's more XF4.2-related, and there might be 
similar problems with new world Macs and/or brand new video hardware...

I wasn't able to run XF4.2 in accelerated mode (with the ati-driver, the 
slow "fbdev"-driver does work). I had to figure out by searching several 
mailing-lists that XF4.2 probably doesn't support my old PCI-video-card. 
The "Ati Xclaim GA", though an actually supported mach64-based board, 
*isn't* assumedly supported if it is one of those cards which has 
IBM-RAMDAC. Bad luck for me, I had a close look on my card and 
discovered a big chip labelled "IBM".

Now I use Xfree-Xpmac-3.3.6-20b (with the -mach64-option) instead of 
XF4.2...Xpmac can be found at http://rpmfind.net ... it is just fast 
enough for KDE or GNOME

Well, using the PPC 7500's unaccelerated onbordvideo instead of the 
ATI-card and running KDE/GNOME isn't really fun, which might be a 
problem for some users...I usually run WindowMaker on slow machines, if 
I need a gui.

Now, given all that, I don't see why YDL2.3 can't be used on old world Macs.

Markus