Home » forums » Debian Help Forums: Users Helping Users » Non-free OS » MacOS

Open Firmware-disaster on Apples Work Group Server 7250?

Tags:

Help!I'm really a newbie and I have just reorganized a WGS 7250 which was in pieces. It showed up to have an old but quite nice application list. The hardwares are; two scsi disks - IBM model DCAS-34220 4,3 gb and IBM DORC-32160 2,1 gb, one floppy disk, 132 mb RAM and there used to be a intern scsi-cd-player but during the work I managed to damage it, so now I'm using an extern scsi-cd. The clock battery is finished.
I managed to install a debian sarge(date from 28 october 2006) and though I got a warning from the installer, I installed the Quik Bootloader. The warning I got was that the installed Quik would not be able to boot any other system on the disk. But I had tried to work with BootX without succes with the post-install boot-process so I thought I would try the Quik to see the result and the reformat the disks and work again with BootXThe Debian Sarge was installed on the 4,3 gb disk and the Mac OS 9 was installed on the 2,1 gb disk. During the configuration of the X11 I got some failures about the screne, probally because I tested a NVidia graphic card that I had found . After finding that I really could not boot my Mac 9 system again, even though I took away the Debian-disk I began to realize that the problem was somewhere in the Open Firmware. To get me to start again I read somewhere that i should zap the pram through opt-cmd-p-r three times. I did so and propably som three times more. What happened was that I got the traditional Apple harmony, a black screen and after(propably 100 sec.of) of time I got a Linux Penguin and after some 100 more and one automatic restart I got a blinkin loggin prompt for my debian installation, but no possibillity to answer. I read somewhere that Open Firmware on Power Mac 7200 and WGS 7250 communicate through the serial port. I need a serial console. So now I wonder; Whats a serial console? Is there another way of recovering the Open Frameware and is it really this which is my probem?
I really want this old, but in it's way, rather rich package to work, and everything seems to work good except for the OF. Please could someone give me a "hand"
With regards
Lärkan

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Magnoliacom
  • Newsvine
  • Furl
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
0
‹ mac-on-linux Oh, now I got it ›

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

serial console

Submitted by pinniped on Wed, 2007-02-21 02:31.

If you have something like a WYSE 'dumb terminal' in the garage, that will do. Otherwise the most convenient 'serial' console is another computer (or laptop) - you will need to connect to the serial port which is being used for the console and you will need to set the correct communications parameters on your 'console'. Between two x86 PCs that means an RS-232 'null modem' cable. I have no idea what serial hardware you computer has.

Have a look at 'www.tldp.org' and look for the 'serial console howto' - it will give you some idea what's done on the 'console' side and the 'PC' side - if OpenFirmware uses the console then you don't have to set the 'PC' side, only the 'console' side. Of course the settings in that HOWTO will probably not work - you need to check the OpenFirmware docs for the serial comms settings to use. (speed, parity, number of bits, number of stop bits, hardware handshaking). You can use the 'minicom' program on a second Linux machine to provide the console - you just have to delete all the modem-related setup strings.

Also use google to find more stories about how people dual-boot Linux and MacOS. (MacOS and OSX are different, so you can't guarantee the boot procedures are the same.)

Have fun. :)

»
Syndicate content