[UFO Chicago] debian woody on an imac rev. b -- success!

[Crow Leader]

Or,

just install OS X

KEN

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter A. Peterson II" <pedro@tastytronic.net>
To: <ufo@tastytronic.net>
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 1:34 PM
Subject: [UFO Chicago] debian woody on an imac rev. b -- success!


> So, I inherited a lime-green iMac from someone recently, but had been
> having trouble getting it to work.
> 
> So here's my little howto, because I finally figured it all out.
> 
> First of all, don't use potato. You'll have problems with Potato PPC
> Cds. (Specifically, QUIK did not make it bootable from the hard disk.)
> 
> iMacs are "New World" Macs, which means that you can avoid a lot of
> the voodoo that you had to do in order to make them boot Linux --
> these guys can do it natively.
> 
> Anyway, I used the LordSutch PPC Net-install .iso, which is available
> here:
> 
> http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/debian-cd/
> 
> I used the woody-powerpc-1 iso.
> 
> Partitioning the Hard Disk:
> ---------------------------
> 
> If you don't want anything else on that disk, use i to erase the map
> and start fresh. If you want MacOS on this box again sometime, you
> shouldn't delete the driver partitions unless you know you can restore
> them.
> 
> Next, create the boot partition using b or use C to create a new
> partition and specify the type as Apple_Bootstrap and make it 800K.
> This is where yaboot will reside.
> 
> Next, create your other partitions.
> 
> Swap on PPC is just another partition, so don't try to specify the
> type like you do on i386 -- just make the partition, and name it
> simply "swap" -- the installer will know what to do with that
> partition.
> 
> Create your other partitions willy nilly and go with the flow.
> 
> Network Support:
> ----------------
> 
> I was thrown by this initially because I didn't see any NIC module
> that looked appropriate... because it's not there. The iMac uses the
> Apple BMAC+ NIC which is compiled into the PPC kernel, so you don't
> need to mess with it. Just tell it to use DHCP (or set your own info)
> and you're set to jet.
> 
> Everything else is the way you'd expect it -- and it reboots nicely.
> 
> Sound Support:
> --------------
> 
> PPC Hardware support is much better in the 2.4 trees, so make sure you
> are using a 2.4 kernel or install a 2.4.x-image-newpmac kernel image
> and reboot or else you'll have trouble with sound.
> 
> The module for the sound card on an iMac Rev. B is "dmasound" and is
> in the /lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/sound/dmasound/ directory.
> Type:
> 
> modprobe dmasound_pmac
> 
> to load the sound modules. Modprobe will load the other modules
> necessary. You probably want to add 'dmasound_pmac' to /etc/modules so
> that it will load at boot time. You may also want to play with
> permissions so that normal users can play oggs and whatnot.
> 
> USB Support:
> ------------
> 
> This Just Works(tm) with the woody netinstall iso I used, so I'm not
> sure what had to be installed to make this work, but it detects the
> USB keyboard and mouse the way you expect it to. You even get to see
> cool little kernel messages in the console when you unplug and replug
> the devices in. I realize this is mundane, but be honest, it's pretty
> cool.
> 
> X Window Support and XF86Config-4:
> ----------------------------------
> 
> This was by FAR the hardest thing I had to deal with. There are two
> secrets that were extremely hard for me to find (which is really why
> I'm writing this message).
> 
> 1. The pointer is /dev/input/mice and uses the ImPS/2 Protocol.
> 
> Ok, that wasn't hard to find... but this was:
> 
> 2. The iMac's built in monitor uses a FIXED 60Hz refresh rate and a
> variable vertical refresh rate of 75-117 Hz.
> 
> If you set *anything* other than 60 for the horizontal refresh your
> monitor will go out of sync, even though X is set up right, even
> though you might set it to 640x480 8bpp... and I dug for a long time
> before I found this post:
> 
> http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/239/2002/4/0/8543162/
> 
> So I did a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86. The chipset is ati (the
> Rev. A&B iMacs have an ATI Mach64 video card), I said yes to using the
> kernel framebuffer, and selected Advanced for the monitor setup and
> put in that refresh information and selected 1024x768 (the max
> resolution on that screen) in 16bpp. It may be possible to run
> 1024x768 in 24bpp depending on your VRAM, but I don't really care
> about it, so I didn't try. YMMV.
> 
> That's it. Good luck, and feel free to ask questions if you have
> them. Also, I hope that other Debian hackers find this post, since a
> few of these pieces of information were pretty hard to find. There are
> some other resources for this stuff on the net, notably
> http://www.imaclinux.net/ but the forums appear to be somewhat dead.
> 
> The best info I found was by intentionally searching mailing lists by
> searching for 'debian powerpc imac xf86config-4' rather than just
> searching for 'imac linux xf86config-4' or something like that.
> 
> Happy Hacking,
> 
> Peter
> 
> -- 
> Peter A. Peterson II, technician and musician.
> ---=[ http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/ ]=---
> 
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