[rescue] Rescuing a powermac 6500/250

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

While I normally would not consider a MAC a rescue candidate, IMHO the
6500 makes a good one. Mine came with a 17" monitor, 250mHz PPC chip, 96
meg of ram, two 4 gig drives, CD-ROM, Yamaha CD writer, 33k modem 
and a zip drive.

All for about $125, It did have some downsides, my oldest son took the
monitor, and there was no ethernet card, and the battery was dead.

I installed MacOS 8.6 on the internal drive and made sure everything was
working. Thanks to this group I found a DEC DE500 ethernet card which worked
fine once I downloaded the drivers (from HP's formerly Compaq formerly DEC's
website).

But I wanted more, I figured  I could get more out of the machine with linux
and using MOL (MAC on Linux) run my MAC stuff at "full" speed.

So I started down the slippery slope of installing Linux on the second
(SCSI) drive.

There are 3 versions of Linux for the PowerPC. One is called MKLinux and
was developed by Apple and others using the Mach Kernel. This was probably
an experiment leading to BSD being the base of OS X,  :-)

It only runs on the original PowerMACs, so that was out,

The second is Yellow Dog. It was a disaster. The latest version comes
with 2 kernels, a 2.2 and a 2.4 one. The 2,2 would not boot, the 2,4
crashed at various times, and I was never able to get an instalation
to complete. It seemd ok, I assume if you could get it to run, or
used an earlier version, it would be ok.

The third is SuSE. Since I was able to copy a set of SuSE 7.1 disks, I
decided to use it. SuSE has many "features" especialy in system
administration, but it is very different than any other distribution.

Since we use SuSE at work, I thought I would go with it. Note that
Yellow Dog linux can be downloaded, SuSE cannot. There is some sort
of FTP instalation, but for some reason I can't remember, I went with the
CD's. 

This caused me problems. The internal CD-ROM did not want to read the
copy of the first disk. I made a copy of the disk using the CD writer and 
toast under MAC OS, but I could not get it to work 100% either. I ended
up with the first copy in the cd writer and the one made on the CD writer
in the internal drive.  This was due to the internal drive not being
useable while booting the kernel, and the external one not being read
for the package files while actually installing. 

I assume if I had an original CD in the MAC drive, or disabled it completely,
it would have gone more smoothly.

After the install, it came up with the network, but without sound and
the CD writer. I then did the online update which downloaded about 100
meg of updates and applied them. I also updated X to 4.2.0, but it was
not necessary and had some problems of it's own.

To fix this:

1. Download and install GCC 3.2.1. This takes about 14 hours to compile.

2. Download an install kernel source. I used 2.4.20. I took the .config file
   from a SuSE kernel which was already installed, 

3. Run "make mrproper" and "make xconfig" to set up links.

4. Compile the kernel: "make clean", "make dep", "make", "make modules",
   "make modules_install". This took about 2 hours.

5. mount the mac drive. SuSE install should have set up a mount point
   "/mac/<hard drive name>".

6. Copy over the kernel to "/mac/<md>/System/Linux\ kernels" .

7. Boot using the kernel.

Steps 6 and 7 are different for a G3/G4, and much simpler I understand.

Assuming the kernel works:

At this point I added support for EXT3 file systems and had to patch
a SCSI module to recognize my CD writer as a CD-ROM drive.
This required repeating steps 4,5,6,7 several times until I "got it right".

Now to install sound, you need to get the latest ALSA (advanced Linux sound
architechure) source files. After unpacking them build them. They have to
be rebuilt each time you change the kernel and it should be done AFTER
the new kernel is booted.

Compile in this order: drivers, lib, oss, utils. After the first time,
only drivers need to be recompiled. 

1, cd to the top of the directory, eg. alsa-drivers.....

2. make clean.

3. ./configure --with-oss

4. make

5. make install

(n.b. make and make install need to be done seperately)

after all are installed, cd to alsa-drivers../utils (only do the copies
once)

	cp alsaconf /bin 
	cp alsasound /etc/rc.d/
	cd ..

6. run alsaconf.


If anyone is interested, I'll document MOL (Mac on Luinux) too.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson
MobilEye Vision Technologies Ltd, R.M.P.E House, 10 Hartom St. Har Hotzvim
Jerusalem, 91450 Israel Tel: +972-2-5417-356 Cell: +972-55-667-090
Do sysadmins count networked sheep?