RE: Trouble Booting Linux PPC On Mac G4 2000

RE: Trouble Booting Linux PPC On Mac G4 2000

[Tim McDaniel]

We are having a great degree of difficulty getting Linux PPC20000
running on a Mac G4 466 tower with 128MB of memory, One 30MB HD and one
CR RW. This is not a NuBus based system. To the best of our knowledge we
have followed the user manual to the tee, and even tried forcing video
settings at the Xboot screen.   


But still, when we encounter the screen where you must chose between
MacOS and Linux and we chose linux, the screen goes black and for all
practical purposes the box appears to be locked.   We've also tried
editing yaboot.conf but can't seem to save the new file.

Any help would be greatly appreatiated.

Tim 

RE: Trouble Booting Linux PPC On Mac G4 2000

[Jeffrey W. Baker]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Tim McDaniel wrote:

>
> We are having a great degree of difficulty getting Linux PPC20000
> running on a Mac G4 466 tower with 128MB of memory, One 30MB HD and one
> CR RW. This is not a NuBus based system. To the best of our knowledge we
> have followed the user manual to the tee, and even tried forcing video
> settings at the Xboot screen.
>
>
> But still, when we encounter the screen where you must chose between
> MacOS and Linux and we chose linux, the screen goes black and for all
> practical purposes the box appears to be locked.   We've also tried
> editing yaboot.conf but can't seem to save the new file.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreatiated.

add "video=ofonly" to your boot command line.  That is, at the yaboot
"boot: " prompt, type "linux video=ofonly"

If that doesn't work, try something else :)

-jwb

RE: Trouble Booting Linux PPC On Mac G4 2000

[Paul Mackerras]

Tim McDaniel writes:

> We are having a great degree of difficulty getting Linux PPC20000
> running on a Mac G4 466 tower with 128MB of memory, One 30MB HD and one
> CR RW. This is not a NuBus based system. To the best of our knowledge we
> have followed the user manual to the tee, and even tried forcing video
> settings at the Xboot screen.   

One possible problem is that many Apple monitors only work at a fixed
horizontal frequency - the Apple Studio 17 monitor (with the
transparent case) that I use with my G4 cube is like that, it will
only operate at horizontal scan rates between 79 and 82 kHz.  If the
kernel video driver chooses a video mode with a scan rate outside that
range the screen goes black.  So I have to put video=aty128fb:vmode:20
on the kernel command line to avoid that.  (It would be nice if the
kernel driver did DDC but it doesn't.)

Other than that, you might get more useful suggestions if you ask on
the linuxppc-user@lists.linuxppc.org mailing list.

Paul.