On Sun, 29 Dec 1996, David Brownlee wrote:

> > PowerBook 140 or 145?  The PB145 seems to have been installed as
> > serial console only, but I seem to be having troubles getting this to
> > work on my PB 140. 
> > 
> 	I'm pretty sure there are - hopefully someone else on the list
> 	will reply...

Well, I tried it again for the first time since sbc became the mainstream
(the sbc driver blew up the filesystem when I tried it on a PB145, but
that was several months ago, in its early stages of beta testing), not
counting one test with one or two of the intvid kernels.  Using any
-current generic, I can't even get out of the booter -- it hangs while
loading the kernel file (even when loading from a MacOS partition), after
about the third preserving number.  I tried increasing the memory
available to the booter to the max available in the machine, and it still
didn't help.  Ideas, anyone?  (This happened with the sbc generics
numbered 13, 15, 16, & 17.  I haven't tried the netbsd12 from the
distribution.)

> 	is probably the closest I've seen. You'll need a PMMU (Memory
> 	management unit) and an FPU will help, but is not essential -
> 	the FAQ should cover that in more detail.

The powerbooks are all 030 machines and up (except posssibly the 100?) so
the PMMU is unnecessary.  I also don't know of any way to add an FPU to
most of them, but fortunately, that's not really a big deal anymore, just
a speed consideration.  I mean, if I can run without an FPU using
basically the binary set from 1.1_ALPHA (w/ fpu-less math libs and a newer
kernel), 1.2 should be a breeze.

Last I heard, the only problems with the PB145 were the ADB support and
the SCSI support (minor fs corruption with the ncrscsi driver, trashed by
sbc).  However, ADB support for many 1xx series powerbooks was added a
while back, so it's possible that the 140/145 work now.  Anybody?

Anyway, the 145 will work (with minor filesystem curruption on a
near-continuous basis) all the way back to the first kernels with decent
floating point emulation, at least in serial console mode.  If you use an
ncrscsi, avoid anything created since early this year, because the fs
corruption will show up as if it were more serious than it actually is.
At least fsck can fix errors that appear to be soft errors....

> > Well, thank you very much for your help so far, I am off to reinstall
> > system 7, as MacBSD seems to have corrupted my system folder.  :)
> 
> 	Bummer :( - good luck with 1.2 & let us knwo how it goes!

Eewwww....

Later,

 /---------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David A. Gatwood             And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  |
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