2004-10-4
"Speed is subsittute fo accurancy."
Once again fortune says it all. Sums up my week three of classes.
Yes, it's week three. I was ahead until this week, and today has been a little sloppy. I turned in an essay with editing scribbles on it because I thought it was due tomorrow, and I did not properly graph out my solutions for math clas. Sigh. Looks like I will need to put in some more effort outside of class. On a happy note, I did manage to ace a math quiz.
My serious work has ground to a halt, I still haven't played with getting Python to sys.stdin.read and iterate through a text stream. Instead I have been distracted by a fun project, which of course interrupted my previous side fun project. I got Sun UNIX, Solaris 9 x86, to install on a machine at work. I quickly made that machine a Windows box since we hired a replacement student worker, and he inherited the Windows box I was using to access our (gag) partially client-side VBSCRIPT help desk app. I already had a nice machine running Fedora, and the Solaris box. Once Windows was set up I made the box headless and access it via VLC from Fedora. Why did I get rid of the monitor from that box? Well...
There was a ticket in the work queue that said to remove two boxes of old computer equipment from a residence hall. I decided that was definitely a ticket for me :) So once I got a chance I took a golf cart out and found the building, and found two worthless dryrotted cardboard boxes full of gear. One was a 386/25, much like the one I bought in '92. One was a PPC Macintosh, a Performa 6220CD. PPC machines have IBM/Motorola RISC processors, very cool. It had a keyboard, mouse, and a real Apple monitor. So the old Apple swallowed all of my spare time for about a week.
It booted up into Mac OS 8 once, and I started adjusting the monitor. I was going to tweak the display, and launched the Monitors and Sound Control Panel, and the machine wedged. After that I got a diskette with a flashing question mark whenever I tried to boot. I was doing some research and knew that this was a NUBUS PPC machine, so only MkLinux would run on it. Not even NetBSD would work. But I took my Gentoo PPC and Yellowdog CDs to work in hopes that at least the boot loader might work, which would let me know the hardware was okay. No soup for me. Unfortunately it was looking like making the Mac OS 7.3 19-diskette set was the only solution, and you have to have a Mac to make the disks. I spent some time with an iBook rigged up with a USB LS120 SuperDisk drive, and made some boot disks. They booted up far enough to tell me that they did not work on that particular machine. Ugh.
At this point I completely disassembled the machine, partly to doublecheck the connections, partly as exploratory surgery. It is a wierdo NUBUS PPC 603e machine, with an awfully overdesigned wierdo case, with non-standard connectors. A wierd combo of single-device IDE cable, wierd narrow SCSI connector, and IWM floppy cable. I tossed out the audio adapter, nobody is sick enough to try to write drivers for those undocumented Woz creations. Not even Woz probably remembers how to write the assembly routines to make them work. There isn't enough room in the case to add any hardware, and the cabling won't support it anyway. 32MB of 80ns EDO RAM, a 1.2GB cheapie Maxtor IDE disk, and a narrow scuzz CD-ROM. 1MB SIMM memory on the wierdo framebuffer display. COMM slot with an ethernet card, and I have a box with a modem in it. I put it back together sans plastic external casing, with the floppy drive jammed in at a jaunty angle.
Scrounging around the office with a maniacal look, as many of us are wont to do, I came across some orange CDs labeled with stylish Apple-like lettering that said "iMac Software Restoration" or somesuch. I figured that the first iMacs probably had OS 8, and I might be able to at least format and "bless" the disk in my paralyzed Mac. Hooray!
Sure enough, the darned thing booted right up. Being the wierdo I am I read all of the documentation on the CD. Unfortunately, it was not possible just to install OS 8, but I had to let a "Restore" script run. Of course, the amount of disk space my Restoration required was a complete mystery. So I played with the partitions and tried to restore, enlarged the HFS partition and tried again, and on and on until I was able to do the restore onto a 450MB partition. This concerned me, because I wanted a lot more space for MkLinux. I also realized that I may not be able to bless a non-Apple hard drive, so upgrading may be out. Unless I want to make the OS 7 19-floppy set, which has a disk utility that can be 'patched' (hacked) with a hex editor to allow use of non-Apple hard drives. That's so dumb.
Anyhoo, with Mac OS installed, I rebooted and set up ethernet. That was an exercise in frustration, dhcp wasn't working. I found an open address on my other machine and set up networking manually, et voila. While OS 8 was installing I had already downloaded the MkLinux bootloader program, a kernel-plus-installer-ramdisk image, and a 2.4.27 kernel image on my Fedora box. Netscape swallowed the memory on the Mac, since virtual memory was turned off. I had to use IE to ftp the files over, much easier than setting up my old 68k machine. Then I configured the lilo.conf file according to the Sourceforge Nubus PowerMac page. I utterly failed to boot the kernel many times. Finally I read that the gzipped kernel/installer and kernel files need to be uncompressed before feeding them to the bootloader. Aladdin Stuffit was included in my "iMac" image, and it understood how to decompress gzip files. I put in my Yellowdog 3.0.1 cd and rebooted.
Now I got as far as booting the kernel, with root filesystem problems. More lilo.conf tweaking to get the ramdisk settings the right size, then I ran into a version problem. My ramdisk installer did not match the version of my media. I tried a couple of times because I've seen this error before, and it's aggravating. Of course nothing changed. I tried removing the CD before I had to choose my install media, and the error disappeared. Narrow thinking on my part made me try to install from my existing CD rather than a network install via http. My CD is version 3.0.1, the newest installer ramdisk was 3.0. D'oh! 32MB is not enough RAM for a Yellowdog network install, and it choked. Okay, had to try it. Gentoo doesn't have an installer image, so it was time to try Debian. The Woody installer ran like a charm, and the only thing that was wierd was setting up X. Many have been down this road ahead of me before, the path was easy and well worn. debconf was asking for my PCI device ID for my video adapter. Well, there is no /proc/pci, because I'm on a NUBUS machine! And, I don't even know if the Linux kernel even talks to the bus, since I understand that Mach may be doing that. Skipped it. You have to switch the bootloader to use the stock MkLinux kernel image after install, and configure the root device to your Linux partition. Boom, I booted into a Debian userland. My wierdo NUBUS PPC machine was a Linux workstation! Mission accomplished.
It took some fiddling with lilo.conf video= settings to get X working with the framebuffer video, but now I have X and a framebuffer console, in glorious 640x480x8bpp color :) I'm not complaining, some poor soul took the time to port Alan Cox's fbcon code to this turd of a machine. In fact, it's generally agreed that the NUBUS PowerMacs, with a 68k board strangling a PPC CPU, were the biggest turds Apple ever made. I set the hostname as "roadapple".
I found I could set the lilo.conf settings using vi under Linux by mounting the Mac OS 8 partition, which saved booting into Mac OS even to tweak settings :) I quickly ran into the one button mouse issue, which I couldn't remember the solution to. Some mailing list archives taught me to set up some function keys using sysctl settings. I think I ended up with F9 for middle-click and F10 for right-click, and I just went ahead and wrote M and R above the keys with a Sharpie, right on the ADB keyboard. Why not?
Now I can use the dillo Web browser, emacs, apt, and I put Sylpheed on for email. I still have about 200MB free disk space, with plenty of swap (~90MB). I got the big 'ol X install that includes development libraries, which is okay because I have gcc, make, perl, and Python now. I installed blackbox and xscreensaver (I'm a fool for Phosphor, I like to run it printing things from the emacs /etc folder). I need to set up my perl script called dipam (dynamic ip address mailer) to send me my IP address via email so I can ssh in if I need to, and I copied over the bzero code so I can get back to working on that.
Enough already, I have verbal diarrhea. But I'm pretty happy having beaten that old Mac into submission, conquered another wierdo machine. There aren't many machines that would be harder to run a free Unix on than a Performa. I may have an early Sparc Sun coming my way soon :)
Time for luxuriant tars and resins. "In Ohio, if you ignore an orator on Decoration day to such an extent as to publicly play croquet or pitch horseshoes within one mile of the speaker's stand, you can be fined $25.00." Night folks, Linc.
Yes, it's week three. I was ahead until this week, and today has been a little sloppy. I turned in an essay with editing scribbles on it because I thought it was due tomorrow, and I did not properly graph out my solutions for math clas. Sigh. Looks like I will need to put in some more effort outside of class. On a happy note, I did manage to ace a math quiz.
My serious work has ground to a halt, I still haven't played with getting Python to sys.stdin.read and iterate through a text stream. Instead I have been distracted by a fun project, which of course interrupted my previous side fun project. I got Sun UNIX, Solaris 9 x86, to install on a machine at work. I quickly made that machine a Windows box since we hired a replacement student worker, and he inherited the Windows box I was using to access our (gag) partially client-side VBSCRIPT help desk app. I already had a nice machine running Fedora, and the Solaris box. Once Windows was set up I made the box headless and access it via VLC from Fedora. Why did I get rid of the monitor from that box? Well...
There was a ticket in the work queue that said to remove two boxes of old computer equipment from a residence hall. I decided that was definitely a ticket for me :) So once I got a chance I took a golf cart out and found the building, and found two worthless dryrotted cardboard boxes full of gear. One was a 386/25, much like the one I bought in '92. One was a PPC Macintosh, a Performa 6220CD. PPC machines have IBM/Motorola RISC processors, very cool. It had a keyboard, mouse, and a real Apple monitor. So the old Apple swallowed all of my spare time for about a week.
It booted up into Mac OS 8 once, and I started adjusting the monitor. I was going to tweak the display, and launched the Monitors and Sound Control Panel, and the machine wedged. After that I got a diskette with a flashing question mark whenever I tried to boot. I was doing some research and knew that this was a NUBUS PPC machine, so only MkLinux would run on it. Not even NetBSD would work. But I took my Gentoo PPC and Yellowdog CDs to work in hopes that at least the boot loader might work, which would let me know the hardware was okay. No soup for me. Unfortunately it was looking like making the Mac OS 7.3 19-diskette set was the only solution, and you have to have a Mac to make the disks. I spent some time with an iBook rigged up with a USB LS120 SuperDisk drive, and made some boot disks. They booted up far enough to tell me that they did not work on that particular machine. Ugh.
At this point I completely disassembled the machine, partly to doublecheck the connections, partly as exploratory surgery. It is a wierdo NUBUS PPC 603e machine, with an awfully overdesigned wierdo case, with non-standard connectors. A wierd combo of single-device IDE cable, wierd narrow SCSI connector, and IWM floppy cable. I tossed out the audio adapter, nobody is sick enough to try to write drivers for those undocumented Woz creations. Not even Woz probably remembers how to write the assembly routines to make them work. There isn't enough room in the case to add any hardware, and the cabling won't support it anyway. 32MB of 80ns EDO RAM, a 1.2GB cheapie Maxtor IDE disk, and a narrow scuzz CD-ROM. 1MB SIMM memory on the wierdo framebuffer display. COMM slot with an ethernet card, and I have a box with a modem in it. I put it back together sans plastic external casing, with the floppy drive jammed in at a jaunty angle.
Scrounging around the office with a maniacal look, as many of us are wont to do, I came across some orange CDs labeled with stylish Apple-like lettering that said "iMac Software Restoration" or somesuch. I figured that the first iMacs probably had OS 8, and I might be able to at least format and "bless" the disk in my paralyzed Mac. Hooray!
Sure enough, the darned thing booted right up. Being the wierdo I am I read all of the documentation on the CD. Unfortunately, it was not possible just to install OS 8, but I had to let a "Restore" script run. Of course, the amount of disk space my Restoration required was a complete mystery. So I played with the partitions and tried to restore, enlarged the HFS partition and tried again, and on and on until I was able to do the restore onto a 450MB partition. This concerned me, because I wanted a lot more space for MkLinux. I also realized that I may not be able to bless a non-Apple hard drive, so upgrading may be out. Unless I want to make the OS 7 19-floppy set, which has a disk utility that can be 'patched' (hacked) with a hex editor to allow use of non-Apple hard drives. That's so dumb.
Anyhoo, with Mac OS installed, I rebooted and set up ethernet. That was an exercise in frustration, dhcp wasn't working. I found an open address on my other machine and set up networking manually, et voila. While OS 8 was installing I had already downloaded the MkLinux bootloader program, a kernel-plus-installer-ramdisk image, and a 2.4.27 kernel image on my Fedora box. Netscape swallowed the memory on the Mac, since virtual memory was turned off. I had to use IE to ftp the files over, much easier than setting up my old 68k machine. Then I configured the lilo.conf file according to the Sourceforge Nubus PowerMac page. I utterly failed to boot the kernel many times. Finally I read that the gzipped kernel/installer and kernel files need to be uncompressed before feeding them to the bootloader. Aladdin Stuffit was included in my "iMac" image, and it understood how to decompress gzip files. I put in my Yellowdog 3.0.1 cd and rebooted.
Now I got as far as booting the kernel, with root filesystem problems. More lilo.conf tweaking to get the ramdisk settings the right size, then I ran into a version problem. My ramdisk installer did not match the version of my media. I tried a couple of times because I've seen this error before, and it's aggravating. Of course nothing changed. I tried removing the CD before I had to choose my install media, and the error disappeared. Narrow thinking on my part made me try to install from my existing CD rather than a network install via http. My CD is version 3.0.1, the newest installer ramdisk was 3.0. D'oh! 32MB is not enough RAM for a Yellowdog network install, and it choked. Okay, had to try it. Gentoo doesn't have an installer image, so it was time to try Debian. The Woody installer ran like a charm, and the only thing that was wierd was setting up X. Many have been down this road ahead of me before, the path was easy and well worn. debconf was asking for my PCI device ID for my video adapter. Well, there is no /proc/pci, because I'm on a NUBUS machine! And, I don't even know if the Linux kernel even talks to the bus, since I understand that Mach may be doing that. Skipped it. You have to switch the bootloader to use the stock MkLinux kernel image after install, and configure the root device to your Linux partition. Boom, I booted into a Debian userland. My wierdo NUBUS PPC machine was a Linux workstation! Mission accomplished.
It took some fiddling with lilo.conf video= settings to get X working with the framebuffer video, but now I have X and a framebuffer console, in glorious 640x480x8bpp color :) I'm not complaining, some poor soul took the time to port Alan Cox's fbcon code to this turd of a machine. In fact, it's generally agreed that the NUBUS PowerMacs, with a 68k board strangling a PPC CPU, were the biggest turds Apple ever made. I set the hostname as "roadapple".
I found I could set the lilo.conf settings using vi under Linux by mounting the Mac OS 8 partition, which saved booting into Mac OS even to tweak settings :) I quickly ran into the one button mouse issue, which I couldn't remember the solution to. Some mailing list archives taught me to set up some function keys using sysctl settings. I think I ended up with F9 for middle-click and F10 for right-click, and I just went ahead and wrote M and R above the keys with a Sharpie, right on the ADB keyboard. Why not?
Now I can use the dillo Web browser, emacs, apt, and I put Sylpheed on for email. I still have about 200MB free disk space, with plenty of swap (~90MB). I got the big 'ol X install that includes development libraries, which is okay because I have gcc, make, perl, and Python now. I installed blackbox and xscreensaver (I'm a fool for Phosphor, I like to run it printing things from the emacs /etc folder). I need to set up my perl script called dipam (dynamic ip address mailer) to send me my IP address via email so I can ssh in if I need to, and I copied over the bzero code so I can get back to working on that.
Enough already, I have verbal diarrhea. But I'm pretty happy having beaten that old Mac into submission, conquered another wierdo machine. There aren't many machines that would be harder to run a free Unix on than a Performa. I may have an early Sparc Sun coming my way soon :)
Time for luxuriant tars and resins. "In Ohio, if you ignore an orator on Decoration day to such an extent as to publicly play croquet or pitch horseshoes within one mile of the speaker's stand, you can be fined $25.00." Night folks, Linc.
Comment on this post [ so far] ... more like this: [foo]