On Sunday 26 June 2005 22:08, Colin wrote: > I've been thinking about creating a MythTV server. I've got two Power > Mac 8500's and a PowerCenter 180 (low-profile) lying around that I'm not > using, but the add-in cards are PC-only (an IDE card and a TV tuner). > > The Mac OS doesn't detect the ATA card, never tried the TV tuner. When > Gentoo boots, would it detect the cards when the PCI bus gets coldplugged?
The TV tuner should work as long as it's supported by a Linux driver. The IDE card might be another issue. Normally they come with an x86 BIOS that needs to be executed on boot so the card is initialized properly before Linux drivers takes over. On the Pegasos for instance there is an x86 emulator in the firmware that can initialize cards with an x86 BIOS, Apple does not have this feature. I'm not saying that it's not going to work but afaik it won't work in a Mac for the reason given above. You should get a card with an FMOD driver (a driver that runs in open firmware) a.k.a. a card made for Mac. One made for Sun/SPARC or any other platform which uses Open Firmware should work too. It's too bad x86 has to live 30 years in the past and rely on stupid architecture-dependant BIOS:es. If they were using Open Firmware like the modern computer world all cards would be virtually platform independent. //David Holm
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