Installing FreeBSD from CD

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 8:17 AM +1000 12/24/04, Peter Grehan wrote:
>Hi Garance,
>
>>The first PowerMac does have a few other odd issues, so the problem
>>might be hardware.  There is some hardware-shuffling I could try to
>>fix the problems, but I first want to know if you would *expect*
>>the August snapshot to work on this hardware?  If not, then I won't
>>waste my time on that shuffling.
>
>  I think Drew Gallatin had some problems with an AGP/400. There was
>a fix committed on Sep 26.
>
>  Have you tried dropping into OpenFirmware and booting manually ?
>(described in 2b at http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/install.html)

That's the "other problem" with this machine.  I can't get it to go
into open-firmware, with or without the CD.  In fact, I can't get
the plain 'option' key to pop up the list of installed OS's which
are available (the machine has two disks, and six different versions
of MacOS installed on it right now).  It also has one firewire port
which is blown out (from an external firewire drive that went haywire
at one point), but the other firewire port is still working fine.
Other than those issues, the machine has worked perfectly fine for
me for the past few years.

I know the option key at startup *used* to work, but I haven't used
this machine for much in the past 4 months (it was replaced by a new
dual-G5).  So, I have no idea what caused option to stop working.  For
all I know, it may have stopped working two years ago.  The option key
does still work as expected in all other situations (after the machine
is booted up), so it's not likely to be a broken keyboard.  But if I
try to trigger any of the bootup-tricks which need the option key, the
computer just freezes up.  This happens with either option key on the
keyboard.

I also have one of the first-run "white iBooks" (dual-Firewire) that I
could try FreeBSD/PPC on, but someone else has borrowed that from me
and I might not get it back for a few weeks.

>I'll put together an up-to-date 6-CURRENT CD image which might
>help things a bit.

Okay, thanks.  It'd be nice to get another freebsd platform up and
running here in my office, and I should have enough spare time over
the next three weeks.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu