TonysMacJournal Mar07

02Mar07

Where have I been for a week? Working on Disk Replication, memory testing and disk test/wipe, mainly. The inflow was relatively low during that time. I did a little with the smartmontools package, which I think should probably become a standard part of disk testing. I use it when wiping/testing the hard drives in the Mac Build area.

Script genMacDisk.sh works, creating a Ubuntu Edgy bootable hard drive that looks pretty much like the one created by the Ubuntu installer. I don't think it covers all of the PowerMac tower boot-device configurations. It might bebetter to leave that for a post-creation step. I'll have to think about that somemore.

G4 Powerbook
Audio does not seem to be configuring during installation on the G4/700 flat-panel and the G4 Powerbook. This forum article suggests a fix.

The 800MHz G4 Powerbook battery seems to be pretty much shot. Tests showed battery life to be about 6 minutes. I asked Dave to leave it plugged in overnight in the Black Hole to see if prolonged charging would have any effect.

The CD drive may actually be a SuperDrive, or CD-RW. If it's using SCSI emulation, cdrecord --scanbus might find it. I got the model number from /proc/ide/hd?, which could be googled.

nVidia
Here is a forum article with a suggestion about installing 6.10(Edgy) on systems with nVidia video controllers. It is based on booting the LiveCD and changing xorg.conf. I'm not sure I ever pursued the LiveCD install far enough to try this. This is coming up again because Loren is working on the G4/700 Flat Panel machines with 7.04(Feisty), which has problems of its own, and there are a couple of G4 PowerMac Quicksilver 733MHz machines that came in with nVidia contollers. I may have commented earlier that there were no nVidia drivers for PPC. That would have been a misinterpretation of things I read. It seems that nVidia (and ATI, too, reportedly) have not released the 3D driver versions for PPC, but the 2D versions work fine. It's just a matter of convincing a PPC installation to use the driver correctly (hence the link mentioned above).