Hello all... As is my wont in life, I seem to have picked a really difficult task for myself in deciding to turn my 1998 G3 266 into a Linux box, and I have spent the entire weekend trying to get it installed.
I built the CDs with jigdo on a Windows 2000 box, and I finalised them, as instructed by the HOWTO. I printed out the installation manual, and I went home feeling relatively pleased with myself. As I went along, I discovered System Disk 2.3.1 and patched my broken firmware. I also installed BootVars, so that I can change the load-base if I need to and looked around for BootX parameters that may be needed. So, here I am... I am using BootX with "no video driver" checked (is this the same as video=ofonly?), and I am sending "hda=noautotune" to the kernel, because the install halts while mounting / otherwise. All of my hardware appears to be recognised by the kernel without a problem... I am not loading or configuring any extra kernel modules during the install. I have had various problems as I go through my epic journey of discovery, but the most consistent thing that seems to happen is that everything goes really well up until when the installer runs dpkg to install base-files and base-passwd. dpkg dies with a bus error every time. I have tried altering the load-base to each of the values suggested in the list of quik quirks at penguinppc.org, and, so far, I am having no joy. What am I missing? Shall I just give up and use my 2-year old iMac instead? I would really love for this to work, so I can sell the iMac instead :-) The machine is a Beige G3 266 with 64 Mb RAM, 4GB IDE drive, a Zip drive on SCSI, a Rage II (atyfb) driving an old Apple 16" trinitron (not an AppleVision monitor). There's nothing unusual about the machine that I can think of... It's been reliable, but it is possible that the hard drive is iffy (DiskFirstAid and Drive setup say it's okay -- I don't have anything stronger)... Any assistance (or avian sacrifices) would be appreciated. Thanks. Carey -- I am at two with Nature. -- Woody Allen http://www.whirlagig.org/
