Firewire Hard Drives

[David C. Oshel]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 14:32:49 -0700 (PDT), Bradley Martin wrote:
> Does anybody any experience putting a firewire drive
> on a yellowdog box? (specifically: rev. 1 b+w g3
> tower)
> 
> How did it go? Anything to keep in mind if I plan o
> doing it?

Howdy,

I just installed YDL 3.0 on an old chiclet iBook and it completely 
ignored my Firewire external hd (fortunately?).  There doesn't seem to 
a driver for it, at least not that I could see ... but would I even 
know what to look for?

Oh, well.  I had hoped to run Mac OS X from the Firewire drive in 
emulation (mol -- "Mac on Linux"?) but that won't be happening for 
awhile.

On the plus side, I was *VERY* happy to see Open Firmware behave 
normally so I could reformat and restore my internal drive.

Sidebar:  Some disappointments:  

One was the extreme sensitivity of the Apple Trackpad mouse on an 
iBook.  Part of this was my fault.  I managed to set the mouse in "Tap 
'n Drag n' Tap" mode, and got confused.  But the pressure sensitivity 
was still set way too high.

And two, KDE appears not ready for prime time on this platform.  Almost 
everything I tried crashed eventually.  This may be related to the 
Tap-Tap setting, which might be buggy on an iBook.

This trackpad bugginess affects the graphical installer, too -- I was 
unable to enter a root password (no cursor, no text, no textfield 
focus) -- so had to use "install-safe" which is just Red Hat's old and 
familiar (and very clunky) keyboard driven demi-graffickal installer.

When I get some time this weekend, I'll probably try to reinstall this 
without the trackpad antics, and see what happens.  If anyone has any 
pointers about trackpads or firewire drives, I too would appreciate!

Dave

--
David C. Oshel		dcoshel@pobox.com
Cedar Rapids, IA	http://www.pobox.com/~dcoshel
``Starkle! All-units talk's stopping!'' - The Leewit, as Pul the 
Grik-dog, in James H. Schmitz' _Witches of Karres_