I'm at my wit's end with this beige G3 (300 Mhz, 30GB IDE hard disk, 384MB RAM) that I've been prepping to give away. I've tried installing both Linux and OS X 10.3 on it, but run into what seems to be the same roadblock.
The video card on it is an IMS Twin Turbo, which I need to use since it has a VGA out port on it, and I don't have any sort of adapter to convert the native Mac video out to VGA. OS 9.1 is peachy keen using the twin turbo's VGA out, but other operating systems seem to insist on ignoring the PCI video card and just use the internal video. Trying to boot into OS X results in the gray Apple logo with the spinny thing showing up onscreen as it boots up, but then that freezes. Eventually I hear the happy "Welcome to OS X for the first time" music playing, letting me know that OS X has booted up. And I swear it plays it in a very mocking manner. This g3 is very close to being defenestrated, and then immolated. I'm assuming that the problem here is that at the last moment, OS X decides that it's going to use the internal video and ignore the PCI card. Similarly, I couldn't get Linux to use the twin turbo, even if it kinda sorta saw that it was there. Xorg just refuses to use the PCI card, instead firing up the internal ATI graphics. I've pushed the CUDA button, zapped PRAM multiple times, and tried using the Open Firmware to set the pci-probe-list value to fffbffff, which a number of sites on the net say is the way to force the G3 to look to the PCI bus instead of internally for the video card. This last bit doesn't seem to take, however... if I use printenv, the pci- probe-list value stays stuck at the default value of -1. Do I have to somehow unlock Open Firmware's ability to set the pci- probe-list values? Is there some other way to force the G3 to ignore the internal graphics and use the PCI card? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
