On Thursday, August 19, 2004, at 12:08 PM, Rick Thomas wrote:
On Thursday, August 19, 2004, at 05:00 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
happy floppy disk reading noises. However, the noises eventually
stopped and a red "X" appeared over the TuxMac. Then nothing. I
had to
manually eject the floppy from the drive.
What we need would be a way to get a log of it or something.
I'll try booting from open-firmware directly on a serial console.
It may take a couple of trys. I've never done that before on a
Mac (On a Sun/sparc machine, it's standard operating procedure,
and I've got lots of experience with Suns -- so it's not
completely unexplored teritory!) Maybe there will be some
console messages that will be helpful.
Well... Try one gives no help.
I booted my PowerMac 6500 with "Cmd-Opt-O-F" keys, while watching
the 6500's "modem" serial port on another machine running MacOS-9
with MacKermit at 38400 bps. I found myself talking to the Open
Firmware monitor on the 6500, as expected. I was able to do a
couple of the exercises in Apple Tech Note 1061 ("Fundamentals of
Open Firmware, part I: The User Interface"). I was feeling
encouraged... so I typed "boot" with the floppy disk in the drive.
It read the floppy. Nothing appeared on the serial console.
Peeking at the monitor on the 6500, all I saw there was a black
screen. Eventually, the floppy reading noises stopped, but still
nothing on the serial console and nothing on the 6500's monitor. I
waited a while. No change.
I've been warned by someone at work that the Linux Kernel may
change the console's bit-rate to either 19200 or 9600 bits/sec.
And once the reading noises stop, it does seem that the console has
switched to 19200, because at that speed, things I type on it are
echoed coherently -- at any other speed, things I type are
garbled. But all it does is echo what I type. It does nothing
useful that I can see. In particular, there are no error or
debug/progress messages of any kind.
Sigh!
Is there some kind of a boot-time parameter that one can set to
tell the Linux Kernel to print verbose debugging progress messages
on the serial console?
While I'm asking, does anyone know how to tell the Macintosh Open
Firmware monitor to set the terminal speed. I'm thinking that if
the Linux Kernel wants 19200, then it would be a good idea to be
talking to the Open Firmware at the same speed, so things don't get
lost in the switch-over.
Enjoy!
Rick
