Subject: Re: Screwed by PowerBook FireWire
From: Dan Burcaw (dburcaw@terraplex.com)
Date: Sat Feb 26 2000 - 10:57:59 MST
Hi Paul,
> While I was in the store, I just so happened to meet the CEO
> (or president, I forget which he sais) of TerraSoft: nice guy;
> he answered some questions, said I'd be "just fine" with the
> installation of YDL on my machine.
My bet is Kai thought your 400mhz PowerBook was like the one we have in
the office -- the '99 Lombard model. I'll brief Kai on the difference
between Lombard and the new Pismo (firewire enabled PBs)
Additionally, we did not find out until yesterday that these machines are
not supported. Previously, reports indicated that they would work with no
problems.
> OK, so I get home, follow all the instructions (among other
> things I admin my own Solaris box at work, so it's not like
> I've never used Unix before), and the machine hangs with
> "booting..." when trying to boot vmlinux via the RAM disk.
Yes, the new powerbook uses the unified motherboard architecture
like the iBook, iMac DV, and Sawtooth G4. What does this mean?
Basically, the kernel shipped with CS 1.1 does not run on these machines.
You have to download a newer kernel with support for UMA.
You'll need 2 things to try installing on this box:
A newer kernel: http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/vmlinux.benh.15.gz
A newer version of BootX: http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/BootX_1.2fc1.sit
I can't promise Linux will work even with these, however. We found out
yesterday that IDE and ADB are not 100% functional on this new box.
> I used the TSS Support Manager web page since I bought the $99
> YDL CD pack with the 30-day support. (Aside: this web-based
> Q&A mechanism is kind of annoying: why not simply use regular
> e-mail?)
With the web based system, your answers and our responses are stored.
Email support can get unanswered and questions lost.
> So anyway, the tech guy asks me, "It's not a FireWire
> PowerBook, is it?" I reply "Yes, it is." I get a reply back
> that says, "FireWire PowerBook G3s are not supported yet,
> sorry." That's it.
> That's it?! To make sure I wasn't to blame for buying an
> unsupported machine, I double-checked YDL's officially
> supported hardware page. Yup, the PowerBook G3 series is
> there. I check under the "What hardware is NOT supported"
> section. Nope, the FireWire PowerBook is not there.
The web site states:
- G3 Desktops, Towers, All-in-Ones, and PowerBooks
- '99 Powerbook G3 Series (bronze keyboard)
I can see that the first line could cause one to believe that this machine
is indeed support. This will be fixed ASAP.
> The tech guy should have said more than he did, like: Will my
> PowerBook will be supported? When? Will YDL 1.2 support it?
> If so, I think I'm entitled to a new CD since I just bought
> mine. (One of the reasnos I bought the CD is so that I don't
> have to spend hours downloading the software.) Is there any
> pre-release version I could get? A patch? Anything so I'm not
> dead in the water?
Nothing is available yet. We just found out yesterday what the problems
are with this machine.
Please email me if you have any additional questions.
Regards,
Dan
Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
Yellow Dog Linux
"The Ultimate Companion for a Dedicated Server"
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
Black Lab Linux
Advanced Workstations and Parallel Solutions
http://www.blacklablinux.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed Mar 01 2000 - 00:07:12 MST