Fedora 9 on an iMac G3

[snoozeburg]

I am trying to breathe new life into a slot-loading iMac G3, ca 1999. There is a 160 mb HD installed and 384 mb RAM. It have ran OSX in the past, but very slowly. I eventually want to use it as an Apache/PHP testbed.

I made a DVD from the ISO download. It passed the SHA1SUM. Ran the install without a hitch - well one hitch: As X server was loading, I got the message that the ATI Rage 128 native video was not sufficient to run X; it failed back to text mode. After reboot the system loads to a text login prompt.

If I login as root and run init 5, the screen flashes about 20 times before returning to a prompt. Same with init 3. In each case the last command to run is anacron whereupon the sequence stops.

Now for the real jab in the eye. I installed Yellow Dog 5.02. Same sequence - except a routine fired of to fix the problem. The image on the resulting screen was the best I had ever scene on any display.

Any ideas? firstboot? video? clean install? (not again, please)!

[ppesci]

Well, I saw similar problem in another thread with no solution.

What about to change the driver in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the line where you see:

driver "ati128"

or something similar, change to:

driver "vesa"

HTH

[snoozeburg]

Well, Pietro and others, that made no change. Here's what I did:

Dropped back to Fedora 7. Everything went very smoothly through the installation. After rebooting, I noticed a failure in red letters. The boot process took about 10 minutes. I thought it had hung. The mouse appears frozen but every minute or so, it "catches up" from attempted movements, but freezes again. Keyboard is similar.

The failure was in MP52XX BestComm Init Failed...Could not locate DMA controller. Google searches are very esoteric. Lots of C code and geek-speak.

Whatever this is, it passes both Yellow Dog and Fedora 9. Any ideas?

Snooz

[bob]

(a little late, but moved to PPC where similar stuff exists )

[ppesci]

Ok snoozeburg.

I search too and agree with you. There appear to be obscure problems on mp5200, but maybe is not your problem because you at least start and go fine in console. Think your problem is with X.

Searching in bugzilla, I found this link that solves hang X problem. See at it:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=155151

HTH

[snoozeburg]

I'm going to do this in the morning.

Linux on the ppc - an account of my experience

I started trying to install Linux to a G3 Blue and White 1998 Rev A using a CD based install (Mandrake). Eventually I gave up, after much persistence, temporarily, due to the flawed nature of the IDE controller on the early editions of those machines. The way forward seems to be to install another pci IDE controller and then try again.

Another learning experience was encountered at this stage. This machine which I am using at the moment is a dual processor IBM portable and I found it impossible to burn CD's on it which would install properly on the Macs. I'm not sure of the details but I think it may concern both hardware and software, certainly the burning software. My solution was to send to a Linux reseller for the 7 CD installation disks for Fedora 9.

At this point I must say that the CD tester on the Fedora is pernicity to say the least, faulty at worst. I had a disk which I burnt pass the tester and then fail at installation and I had one of the disks I had sent away for fail the tester yet install without error. This was after I verified the checksum for the CD iso I had burnt.

I moved on to a 1999-2000 G3 iMac, the one with the CRT, previously running OS X, the memory of which I upgraded to 1GB of RAM.

At this point I shifted to Fedora, attracted by the Fedora Java interpreter, and at present I have a working installation of Fedora 9 with X Windows which however still needs some further work.

The following comments represent some of the things I learnt on the way. I do not know all the answers by any means but I found that reaching this point took me an inordinate amount of time and effort and these comments may assist others.

The G3 ppc needs to boot from an Apple bootstrap 1MB (or more) partition and you must allow for this when setting up the partition table. Some Linux installations (Mandrake) will give instructions about how to tell Open Firmware to configure the bootdevice (bootdev) for the installed Linux but I did not need to do this with Fedora.

I had trouble with the partitioning of the 20GB dirve. This might have been because the installation I chose to install was so big - some 1500 packages. In the end I created just two partitions, the Apple bootstrap partition and one other partition for the rest of the drive. This meant no swap partition. The installation was of the order of 7-8 GB. I thought that the 1GB of RAM might mean that I didn't really need a swap partition but with hindsight I wish I had also put in a swap partition.

Actual installation of Fedora 9 proceeds smoothly when you have good media and may take about two hours.

After the install I ran into the problems I had learnt to expect with X Windows. It turns out that there are at least two similar but not necessarily syntactically congruent versions of the configuration files for Linux. The one I needed was based on Xorg. The xorg.conf(5) page was very helpful.

The real crunch was that Xorg -configure command which I used to build an xorg.conf file defaults to selecting an invalid video driver. The small print somewhere says that you need to check and findout which driver is appropriate to your machine. In my case it was fbdev not ati or r128 - the drivers which seem to be more in evidence when you look for xorg.conf assistance. Further more the installer doesn't do much to set the HorizSync and VertRefresh settings to sensible values and it is not exactly easy to locate the appropriate values. In my case these were HorizSync 60-60, VertRefresh 75-117. There is also the issue of identifying the correct amount of video RAM on the video card. One of my iMac crt machines seems to have eight MB and the other 16MB.

Anyway, now X Windows works. I'm having issues with permission for users other than root to run X Windows. My workaround is to login as root, su to another user and then startx. Probably it's my own fault for starting X Windows from the root account in the first place and the problem is likely to be due to either the location of a file or to a fle permission being incorrect.

The system is currently workable but things are running a bit slow, so I'm going to try editing the partition table to tack on a swap partition and also I'm planning on trying the icewin window manager. I guess this may mean yet another installation but at least I will take care to save my current xorg.config file.

I'd like to say a general thankyou to those others all over the net who posted various bits of their experiences which I have found helpful.

[rjmyers]

I have a G3-600 with 1 Gb of ram and an ATI Rage128 TR ULTRA AGP for my video.
I've noticed in the non-starting of running startx, that the log points out fb1 -> fb7
are not available, but fb0 is defined. It shuts down, according to the log, because of
not being able to find a valid framebuffer device (even though fb0 was found).

I also found the following messages in my running dmesg on my G3:

aty128fb: Invalid ROM signature 8181 should be 0xaa55
aty128fb: BIOS not located, guessing timings
aty128fb: Rage 128 TR Ultra AGP [ chip rev 0x4] 16M 128-bit SDR SGRAM (1:1)
console: switching to colour frame buffer device 128x48
fb0: ATY RAGE frame buffer device on Rage 128 TR Ultra AGP

Questions:
1) can I somehow do a mkdev to create fb1 through fb7 in my /dev directory?
2) is there a "known" xorg.conf file that works and could someone list its entries here or
email them to me?

-Bob

This xorg.conf file was working fine, see file included later, but I had to reinstall due to the fact that I had built the system without a swap partition and it was all just too slow.

When reinstalling I encountered difficulties but finally managed to install a reduced system. Unfortunately now X Windows does not run properly. Although I can half start it as an ordinary user, a marginal improvement, there are now some other X configuration issues.

When it starts it only half starts, doesn't load the splash screen or make the applications available although it does show the Computer icon and the Trash icon.

It warns of a configuration fault as shown:

Install problem
The configuration details for Gnome Power Manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your system administrator.

I simply copied the xorg.conf file from the first installation and then used it for the second.

I have encountered the frame buffer device issue but have no answers.

Another issue I have now is to do with the file system which gives trouble after I write to files perhaps because I did not use Logical Volume Management when partitioning.

find also gives a warning about the wrong driver possibly being in use. This is an error which has been present more or less throughout the time I have been installing to the iMacs.

Until I got a message about the most recent posting I had put it all aside in disgust.

Hope this is of some use.

xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
FontPath "catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d"
FontPath "built-ins"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dri"
Load "GLcore"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "dri2"
Load "xtrap"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "iMac"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 60-60
VertRefresh 75-117
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
### [arg]: arg optional
#Option "NoAccel" # [<bool>]
#Option "SWcursor" # [<bool>]
#Option "Dac6Bit" # [<bool>]
#Option "Dac8Bit" # [<bool>]
#Option "DMAForXv" # [<bool>]
#Option "ForcePCIMode" # [<bool>]
#Option "CCEPIOMode" # [<bool>]
#Option "CCENoSecurity" # [<bool>]
#Option "CCEusecTimeout" # <i>
#Option "AGPMode" # <i>
#Option "AGPSize" # <i>
#Option "RingSize" # <i>
#Option "BufferSize" # <i>
#Option "EnablePageFlip" # [<bool>]
#Option "Display" # <str>
#Option "PanelWidth" # <i>
#Option "PanelHeight" # <i>
#Option "ProgramFPRegs" # [<bool>]
#Option "UseFBDev" # [<bool>]
#Option "VideoKey" # <i>
#Option "ShowCache" # [<bool>]
#Option "VGAAccess" # [<bool>]

Identifier "Rage 128"
Driver "fbdev"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Rage 128 Pro Ultra TR"
BusID "PCI:0:16:0"
Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 Pro Ultra TR"
Monitor "iMac"
DefaultDepth 24

SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

[rjmyers]

Thanks for the info! I'm up and running successfully now -- did such by taking what I had in my
current xorg.conf file (started with the info in post#5, then started adding in the corrections that you supplied.)

I will say that before doing this, I did create the other framebuffers manually and it helped during the process. I did this by logging in as root and doing the following:

#cd /dev
#mknod c fd1 29 1
#mknod c fd2 29 2
#mknod c fd3 29 3
#mknod c fd4 29 4
#mknod c fd5 29 5
#mknod c fd6 29 6
#mknod c fd7 29 7
#chmod 600 fd1 fd2 fd3 fd4 fd5 fd6 fd7 <- not sure about doing all at same time. I did each
one seperately.

I can now run startx as root and/or a local user with no problem.

I will say, however, that running the software update for the first time ***REALLY*** takes a long time to run.

-Bob

It is the little things which catch you out and sometimes become insurmountable obstacles. In my case while muddling about with a Fedora installation to the iMac G3 it was probably the memory speed of the RAM I was using which caused so many problems for so long.

I was under the impression that the G3 would simply run the PC133 SDRAM at 100mhz. The machines started ok and everything worked, whether the initial system was OS 9 or OS X but Linux installations were always plagued by hard disk and file system problems. The glitches were there in installations involving several different machines and also occurred with 256MB PC133 RAM modules.

Eventually I put it all aside for a while but after a spell I returned to the fray with the idea graduallly forming that maybe the problem was related to the RAM - either the size of the modules 512Mb or the speed PC133 or even the amount of RAM in total - 1GB.

Another machine was called into service this time and I can't be absolutely certain what the problem was but I suspect that it was to do with Linux detecting the RAM speed at 133 mhz and then going ahead based on that finding. If the rest of the system, bus etc. then didn't keep up properly this failure to keep up could be manifested in corrupted hard disk files.

It's only a theory but if you're encountering this corrupted file problem then you might like to look at the RAM speed as a possible cause.

The installation this time was faultless. A minor tweek for XWindows using the xorg.conf file I posted earlier was all that was required. The installation only has 168MB of RAM on board and the machine - a 1999 350mhz G3 iMac - is a bit slow but everything I've looked at seems OK - and there are 1520 packages there to play with. I'll probably boost the memory to 1GB and see what effect that has on performance.

I'm thinking about putting together a cluster of these machines to muddle about with - not sure that it's worth doing in terms of processing grunt but my gut feeling is that these machines can still be useful.