26 Jul 2002 (updated 26 Jul 2002 at 21:26 UTC)
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G3 day
So, the beige G3 300 arrived. And so did woe.
Well, it's not quite that bad. The thing is that I'd wanted to set the
machine up standalone, so it wouldn't need MacOS. Unfortunately I've been
unable to get Open Firmware to boot quik at startup time. So, I've
had to resort to booting into MacOS and then quickly dropping back to
Linux via BootX.
Everything else about the Debian PowerPC installation went just fine, fine.
I'm a bit disappointed that I can't currently keep the box running without
proprietary software though. I described my woes to the
debian-powerpc list, but I'm not so hopeful of finding a way out.
Hardware-wise, I like the box. It's very easy to get inside and
add or remove devices. I've got a USB PCI card and a Firewire PCI card
inside it. They're working with kernel 2.4.19-rc3 just fine.
Maybe, if I close my eyes and wish hard enough, someone will know how to make
it boot from Open Firmware. Just maybe.