I have just spent most of the last couple of days installing Debian Woody on a PowerMac 9600/300 and getting kernel 2.4.18 built and (mostly) working. I have a couple of remaining issues that are plaguing me.
1) If I use a pre-built 2.4.18 kernel, or a normal home-built one, the monitor goes blank on boot-up. I have tried just about all of the combinations of video=ofonly, video=fbdev and video=imsttfb without success. The 2.2 installation kernel that I was using to install does work, and looking at /var/log/dmesg, the difference is that 2.2 thinks the video board uses the TVP RAMDAC, whereas 2.4 thinks it uses the IBM RAMDAC. If I comment out the line that sets "pdev->ramdac = IBM" in drivers/video/imsttfb.c, and let it fall through to the TVP case, I get monitor output using video=imsttfb, except that the cursor is invisible or black. The /proc/devices-tree entry indicates that I have an imstt128mb8A (IBM RAMDAC), and setting the output-device in OpenFirmware to /[EMAIL PROTECTED]/IMS,tt128mb8A gives me boot-time output. lspci -v indicates the card is an IMS 9129 Twin Turbo 128 Rev 01 (PCI device ID is 0x9128), and claims it has 16MB memory (rather than the 4 or 8Mb suggested by the driver). I haven't pulled the video card out yet to check out what chips are on board. What on earth is happening? I'm not going to be running X on this machine, so I only care about console output, but I don't want to accidentally blow the video card up. I would like a cursor too, it makes it much easier to see where you're typing. 2) Having got video on bootup, how can I get rid of the d**m penguin on the bootup screen? It really makes scrolling r-e-a-l-l-y slow. 3) Can I force an extra SCSI controller to be lower in the search order than the on-board controllers? If so, how? The next step will be to move data from my old machine over, however I need to put a PCI SCSI card in the PowerMac with the drives from the old machine attached, the data is on U2W drives and the internal controller doesn't do U2W. When I tried putting the card in the PowerMac the kernel scanned it first, changing the root filesystem drive from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb. It wasn't a success, needless to say. A final comment about the install process: it would have been much easier if the Debian on PowerPC installation Manual had mentioned "nvsetenv" somewhere. I wasted a lot of time rebooting and trying to type blind at prompts because OpenFirmware input and output was connected to the serial port. This installation was a complete replacement for MacOS, by the time I found out I needed to change the OpenFirmware settings it was too late to run bootvars. The 2.2 installation kernel was booting however, I could have used nvsetenv much earlier to reset the output and input device. a.
