Re: Booting original G3 iMac?

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 9:30 AM, John D. Baker 
<jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost> wrote:
> So, I'm starting to get more serious about abandoning MacOS X in favor
> of NetBSD/macppc (as PPC OSX versions fall off maintenance).
>
> The other day I decided to give my original Bondi-Blue iMac a go with
> -current (5.99.22 from 11 December 2009).  Once I dug a genuine Apple
> USB keyboard out of my stash (so I could drop to OF) it loaded
> ofwboot.xcf over the network, loaded GENERIC kernel over NFS and jumped
> to it.
>
> After kernel messages scrolled by for a bit, the screen went mostly
> black (except for some garbage and vertical stripes in the top third).
> and the machine seemed to do nothing more.  No network activity that
> I could observe, no response to keyboard, etc.  Had I had a paperclip
> handy, I'd have pushed the reset switch, but the front-panel power
> switch was handy and worked.
>
> I tried again and mostly the same thing happened, except the screen was
> completely black.
>
> I guess it has issues attaching the framebuffer.  This appears to be
> an iMac Rev. B as it has the ATI RagePro video chip and 6MB SGRAM.
> Not sure if these are well handled by genfb.
>
> Thoughts, suggestions?

This probably isn't a super response, but it would be worth trying
other versions to see if they work, and at what point the thing broke.

It's probably the case that nobody has booted one of those in a while
and there just isn't any knowledge if a change was made that broke it.

Starting with 4.0 is probably a good idea.

Andy