At 5:07 PM -0800 3/1/00, Douglas Wagner wrote:
>Hello Tim:
>
>I understood from an earlier exchange on this and the MacManager lists that
>OS X is not compatible with 2400 hardware so would not run unless someone
>made the effort to port the kernel to the 2400c.
>
>It's encouraging to hear you have run OS XS on the G3 upgraded 2400c. Do you
>happen to know if you are likely to have any success with OS X (Client) when
>it arrives?
OS X has supported the 3400 motherboard (via the "unsupported
install" option) for a very long time, even back when it was still
named Rhapsody. The 2400 is a small 3400 (more or less), so the
kernel support for the 3400 can support the 2400 too.
Some feared that the rewriting of the OS X kernel between OS X Server
and the mass market OS X would also eliminate support for the older
machines (the 604e PCI Macs, 3400, etc.). This hasn't happened yet,
and I have seen Apple people coming out and saying that many of these
machines will even be fully supported installs by release time.
The major hurdle I have run into when installing on the 2400 is that
all the versions I've tried do not recognize the 2400's Gestalt
Machine ID as a valid install target. They do recognize the 3400, so
I wrote a program that can change the Gestalt response to the 3400's
machine ID. This is sort of like the "Wish I were" utility, except
that mine is an application, not an extension, and has a... um...
*minimalist* UI. You can't use an extension to do this job as you
must boot off the installer CD to run the installer program.
Another problem is that it can be kind of difficult to get the
initial OS X boot from CD to work. (First you boot regular MacOS
from the install CD, then it reboots into MacOS X from the CD, then
it installs, then you reboot into MacOS X from the HD.) Since it is
a 2400, you must use an external SCSI CD-ROM to install, and (at
least with the versions I tried) the MacOS installer doesn't do a
great job of telling Open Firmware how to boot OS X from the CD. I
don't remember exactly what I had to do in order to get it to go.
It's the kind of thing that might be obvious to me, but wouldn't be
easy for somebody who hasn't dealt with Open Firmware before.
The installer stuff should be point and click by the time Apple
releases a public version.
I have not tried OS X DP3 (the current developer release) yet. I
believe the installer is supposed to be a bit different now, so I
will have to try it one of these days and see how it goes.
Tim Seufert
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