Greetings Cookers,

Here is the longer installation report I promised. This is not intended to
try and solve my problems; rather, it is for reference in the list archives
and for information to the developers. I have not made any attempts to fix
the problems I encountered (obviously I will do this later), I just wanted
to write an objective report of my installation and first run.

Installation System:
Apple PowerBook G3 2000 (Pismo)

Stock Config:
400 MHz G3, 10 gig hdd, 24x cd/dvd-rom, ATI Rage Mobility 128 w/16 megs vram

Non-Stock Config:
320 megs ram, Apple Airport card

Peripherals (some tested, some not):
Microsoft Intellimouse Optical (4 buttons + scroll wheel, USB) (tested)
Dazzle USB CF card reader (somewhat tested)
Nikon Coolpix 775 direct USB connect (not tested)
Handspring Visor USB sync (not tested, but it will probably work fine)
HP DeskJet 940c USB (somewhat tested)
CanoScan N650U USB scanner (not tested, probably won't work as it uses a
proprietary interface, not SANE)
iPod in firewire disk mode (not tested)

Installed via:
CD-ROM [burned with Roxio EasyCD Creator 5 under Windows XP, from 8.2 beta
ISO's]

Install method:
install-aty128fb

Notes on install process:
Booted up by inserting Cooker CD 1 and holding down 'c' key.  Booted up into
install-chooser screen just fine.  Chose install-aty128fb option. Then,
chose CD install option. Install app loaded from CD ok.
Graphics and video looked good - no video card problems using the aty128fb
installer.
Went with expert installation. Setup of peripherals went ok, except that the
mouse config does not seem to acknowledge the scrolling of my scroll wheel.
It does acknowledge the clicking of the scroll wheel, but not the scrolling.
[Note: once system was up and running, scroll wheel worked fine under X]

The package installation went fine.  I chose the packages I wanted and they
installed without problems, it prompted me properly for the second CD when
needed. I periodically switched to VT3 to check on the installer progress,
and saw no problems there.

In the post-install config, most things went ok. The only thing that I
noticed, and this is not so much a bug but an annoyance, is that I can't
seem to *not* configure existing network interfaces. What I mean is this: I
have an Airport card as well as built-in GMAC ethernet.  I don't use the
GMAC ethernet at all; I only use the airport.  Both of them are properly
detected, but when I go to configure LAN interfaces, there is no option to
simply *not* use the GMAC. So I configure it with a dummy IP address. I
would rather have an option to omit this device from configuration.

Video configuration went great. My display was detected just fine and I
chose X 4.2.0.

Configuration of yaboot/ybin within the installer was extremely easy and
painless. It let me set up my triple boot the way I wanted it, and I have
had to make no changed to my yaboot.conf after configuring in the installer.

Rebooting the system was the 'biggest' problem - the boot device was not
properly set to the bootstrap partition. Maybe ybin could do this somehow
within the installer? Luckily, Ben Reser had advised me on how to fix this.
(Boot with Apple+Option+O+F; Type: setenv boot-device hd:n,\\:tbxi Where n
is the partition number your boot strap is on.)  With his fix, my system is
now properly set up to bring up the bootloader.

Notes on system startup:
Did not boot into the Aurora graphical boot monitor. I seem to recall that
this was the default in Mandrake 8.0, but it just did the regular text boot
here.  Maybe this is intended.
It seems that various libraries were not found, and there were some errors
in files:
usb-ohci not found
cardmgr ./config-opts error on line 8
YP map server: execvp: no such file
httpd-perl & httpd: couldn't find libmm.so.1
SMB & NMB: couldn't find libacl.so.1

Notes on graphical login:
The background on the graphical login screen looked good, however the login
box itself did not look good. The buttons looked like normal GDK platinum,
but the background of the login box seemed to be nonexistent. Instead, it
was the checkerboard-grey of the default X server background. The user icons
were displayed on top of it, and there was black text that was barely
visible due to the grey background.  It looks like perhaps it tried to load
a pixmap for the login box, but was unsuccessful? After logging in and out
several times, I got various results: sometimes the login box background was
dark blue, sometimes, black, sometimes the text was clear, sometimes there
was a moire effect. Errm. For the moment I have switched to runlevel 3 as
the boot default and am starting X manually.

Notes on various window managers:

GNOME:
When attempting to start GNOME either manually or through the GUI login, it
kicks back out with an error message to the effect that it can't find
libgnomecanvaspixbuf.so.1.
I couldn't test GNOME because of this.

KDE:
KDE started OK and performed as expected.

WindowMaker:
WindowMaker started OK and performed as expected

Other apps:
Mozilla: worked as expected
Evolution: would not start up due to missing library file:
libbonobo_conf.so.0
Mandrake Control Center:
Most control center pieces worked surprisingly well. There were only a few
things I noticed:
HardDrake: won't start up. Says it's starting up, but then it doesn't...
Printer config: It didn't detect my USB printer. I ran a manual setup for a
printer on USB 0, but when trying to print a test page, I got nothing. I am
sure that there is more I will need to do in order to get this working, but
from a new-user perspective it would not be trivial.

Kernel:
I get frequent errors of the format:
[drm:r128_cce_indirect] *ERROR* process 2511 using buffer owned by 0
I don't seem to notice any problems with my display or with graphical
performance. Is this a serious issue or just a normal error to be expected
from the DRM module?

That's my report.  Hopefully in this upcoming week I will be able to do more
testing and fix some of the problems.  One thing I would like to try is to
see if I can use my iPod as a firewire hard drive under Linux. Anyone tried
this?

Overall, looking good!

Thanks Mandrake,

Peter
--
Peter R. Wood - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://prwdot.org/


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