esme wrote:
On Saturday 06 Aug 2005 10:45, Hermann Ertl wrote:
Checking because I haven't received mail for quite some time.
Me neither, but then again, I've moved to a different computer, and forgot to
make a copy of my address book! :-}
Folks, OS9 on my Starmax drives me nuts. I don't like it one bit, so I'd like
to try running some form of Linux on it. However, when I tried installing a
PPC flavour of Linux on it, the Starmax just would not boot from the Linux
CD.
Any ideas as to why, and what I might do about it?
Unfortunately the Starmaxes are old world Macs and don't have open
firmware. That means you won't be able to boot from a contemporary Linux
CD, like Yellow Dog Linux 4.0. Dug up this link from some support pages:
http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2005-March/018428.html
Looks like YDL doesn't even support our old worlders any more.
Looks like Debian is an option:
http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/pmac
This may also be useful:
http://penguinppc.org/bootloaders/quik/
LinuxPPC may not be the best route, but you might try this link:
http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=8
It has the most recent version of LinuxPPC for download, which luckily
died about the time New Worlders came out. It oughta work If not, I've
got some old CDs of LinuxPPC 1999 laying around which I did successfully
install on my StarMax 3000. Unf. the power supply on my box seems to be
dead now (won't do anything when I hit the power button -- yes, it's
plugged in), but if you've got some place online I can ftp the ISOs, I'd
be happy to.
You'll be using BootX instead of something like yaboot(?) that comes
with more recent versions of Linux for PPC (which, let me say, is a
shame. Installed YDL on an iceBook and the installation is finally
pretty easy to follow). BootX has to boot into OS 9- before starting
Linux, but is a minor annoyance at worst. For people like me that'd
installed a G3 upgrade in the StarMax, it's a huge boon, as you'll've
loaded the G3 cache enabler before jumping to Linux, allowing you to
have a G3 Linux box instead of a 603 or 4 without a cache in the new OS.
And all that said, don't get too excited. I wasn't horribly impressed
with LPPC's performance, though I can't recall if this was pre or post
G3 upgrade. It is a good alternative, you'll be able to get up-to-date
applications running, and once you're more familiar with Linux, you
should eventually be able to figure out how to download and compile a
newer kernel. Fwiw, I've tried OS X on low-end hardware (Beige G3 266
with 412 megs or RAM or so, and still pretty iffy), so I'm not sure even
if Maxes get great XPostFacto support it'll be a greatly option for
daily home use.
Best of luck,
Ruffin Bailey
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