Hi, On 25/08/05, Roopchansingh, Vinai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > > I have not be able to get any console activity at all, either with fbset > or otherwise. 2.4 works fine, as does X. But the boot text is "mildly" > troubling ;-) > > Might just be some weird combo of Old World Macs, ATI cards and the G3 > upgrades ...
Yepp, there is something strange with the platform. I regularly power on my Mac and the screen remains black. The day before yesterday I installed Sarge on this machine, booted into the installed system using Quik without any bigger problems (except for missing boot messages, and no messages from Quik at all). It's just an idea, but maybe the path to the ATI card is to long for this old and buggy OF-release. I don't have these problems with other cards, for example a Matrox Millenium II-Mac edition. As I turned on my Mac yesterday evening the screen remained black, and I had to do a Prom-Zap in order to make it work again. Oddly enough, sometimes it's sufficent to do a CD ROM-boot to get a screen. After my experience of the last couple of days, for me the best practices seem to be to - Create an OS 9 partition, install and configure BootX - Install the system - Boot into it - Copy the kernel file to ":System folder:Linux Kernels" Alternately, after booting into Linux - use nsetenv|grep device to check the configuration of input-device, output-device, boot-device - use dmesg|grep ^fb0 to determine the path of the graphics adaptor (make sure that output-device is set to this path, I noticed that it isn't in my configuration) - write down all values. - these can be used in conjunction with BootVars to boot into Linux again FYI: With an ATI card, specifying "No video driver" when booting the Installer doesn't work. There isn't any output until the installer finally starts up, and the additional consoles remain black. Disabling the "No video driver" option in BootX, gives a standard console. Next thing I'll try is to upgrade to a 2.6.12 kernel as Sven Luther suggested. Cheers Christian
