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scip · Apr 6, 2001, 08:37 PM

I've got a 9500 with a Newer 300MHz G3 processor upgrade card. Will LinuxPPC install on this? Is it a "supported" configuration? linuxppc.com does not specifically say if this will work.

I don't have the Q42000 version, but the 1999 version. So I'd need to know specifically if that version would work.

Chris_G · Apr 7, 2001, 12:04 AM

I don't see why not. I ran LinuxPPC 1999 on my G3 upgraded PowerCenter Pro... granted they're not even close to being the same machine but it does go to show you the variety of boxes PPC runs on. It will run on a 9500. It will run with G3 upgrade cards. Therefore, I would imagine it will run on your system. Hope this helps. BTW, if you have a fast (DSL, Cable) connection you can download the 2001 image, or install via FTP. That is the beauty of a free operating system.

Cheers!
Chris

scip · Apr 9, 2001, 08:59 PM

I burned a CD from the Q42000 image I downloaded. I know it is a valid boot disk, because I successfully booted my iMac DV SE at work (not the machine I want to install it on).

It won't boot my 9500/wG3 card. I read the documentation, and created a 75MB partition on a separate drive and copied the Linux Kernels, System Folder, live folder, and ramdisk.gz (whatever it's called) file to that partition. I selected it in the startup disk cdev, and it starts to boot, but then throws a kernel panic: machine check error.

I guess that means it can't detect what type of machine this is, right? I took out the PC compatibility card, and the stock Mach64 video card (I'm using a RAGE 128). I still get the machine check panic.

Has anyone successfully installed LPPC on a 9500 with a NewerTech 300MHz G3 card?

I have two other cards that I haven't tried taking out yet. A Farallon fast Ethernet card and an Adaptec 2930U Ultra SCSI card. Would these make a difference?

hidozage · Apr 10, 2001, 10:14 PM

"?I have two other cards that I haven't tried taking out yet. A Farallon fast Ethernet card and an Adaptec 2930U Ultra SCSI card. Would these make a difference?"

Pull out the "Adaptec 2930U Ultra SCSI card" see if it will boot into linux.

tooki · Apr 11, 2001, 04:09 PM

The ethernet and [particularly] the SCSI cards are much more likely suspects than the processor upgrade card. Do as hidozage said and pull them, and then see if it'll work.

tooki

scip · Apr 11, 2001, 08:15 PM

Well, amazingly I got it to install, but was having problems booting.

What I had to do was create a small HFS standard partition and copy the System Folder and Linux Kernels folder from the CD to this partition. That allowed me to boot the machine and get into the installer. It installed, then when I rebooted, I kept getting these errors that said kernel not found, no matter what video setting I tried.

I finally gave up last night, but not before I downloaded a different yaboot.conf file from the linuxppc.org site.

Tonight when I came home, suprisingly, the machine booted!!! This was the first time I tried it with that new yaboot.conf file.

I'm still a little confused. What seems to be happening is that it's loading the kernel from the /boot partition that I created. Is this ok? I was under the impression that the installer would install the kernel on the / partition.

When it boots, it prints to the screen all the services, etc. that are loading, and it pauses for a long time as the starting (or initializing, whatever) sendmail phase. It eventually continues, but since I don't need sendmail, how do I disable it?

One other thing I noticed is that the space bar is overly sensitive in linux. I don't think it's the keyboard, because it works fine in OS 9. I seems to interpret one tap of the space bar as more than one, which makes it next to difficult to issue a simple cd / command properly. Other characters don't seem to have this type of hyperactive repeat. Has anyone seen this?

Maybe it is the keyboard, and it just needs cleaning or replacement...

Steve