Installing 5.0.2 on a PowerBook G4

[Frank Wille <frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost>]

Hi,

two days ago I got my PowerBook from eBay and wanted to try it with
NetBSD. Last time I installed NetBSD/macppc was 3.1 on a PowerMac G4,
but the installation procedure didn't become easier since then. ;)

Some notes I made during the first day:

1. What I cannot understand is that the hfstools are not included on the
installation ISO, to be able to copy ofwboot and the kernel. The only
way seems to be to boot with the CD, chroot to my hard disk and get the
hfstools packages from somewhere. Does everybody have to do that manually,
or am I missing something?

2. Pdisk seems to have a small bug, that it cannot initialize the
partition map when it is already present (but too small, in my case).
You have to clear the first sectors of the disk first.

3. Ofwboot can still only read the kernel from filesystems known to OF?
It shouldn't be difficult to make ofwboot read the Apple partition map
and create a disklabel to find the NetBSD root partition. I added RDB
partition support to ofppc's ofwboot some time ago, and I would try to
improve macppc's ofwboot as well, when there are no reasons against it.

4. My PowerBook has a 1.5GHz G4, but dmesg says it is running at 750MHz.
Is that just a calculation bug, or will it really run so slow? ;)
Or is something needed to switch the CPU into full speed (I remember the
PowerBook can run at slower speeds to save energy)?

5. This PowerBook has a german keyboard, which is recognized as an USB
keyboard (ukbd0). Unfortunately the layout is wrong when switching wscons
into encoding=de. For example the "^ °" key responds as "< >" and "# '" as
"|" (I still haven't found the '#' on this keyboard). Is there anything
I can do?

6. The card bus slot (cbb0) is recognized but does not work. When I plug
in a card nothing happens. Vmstat shows that the device didn't cause any
interrupt. Known problem or defective hardware (I forgot to check the
card bus under OSX) ?

7. The BCM43xx wireless is unknown to the kernel. But I was happy to find
out that it is supported in current. I will try that soon! :)

8. Is any work being done on the power management? Would be very nice
when running NetBSD/macppc with a battery.

9. Controlling the display brightness and the keyboard illumination would
be great. But I guess there is no documentation available?

I still have to test if X11 works...

-- 
Frank Wille