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).
03mar07
Many of the later G4 towers have nVidia video controllers. The expected donation evolution described by RFS (systems coming into FreeGeek will have ever 'increasing' specs) predicts that we will be seeing more of these as time goes by. Loren and I talked about the variety of G4 tower configurations, and I said I would make a chart of the G4 models that showed specs for the various models. I'm working on that. It sure would be nice to solve the nVidia on Dapper/Edgy problem. (Mac Models page created 05mar07]])
Some G4 towers have a DVD-RAM drive. This kind of drive was an early DVD-RW format that apparently did not catch on. The literature says that it was more popular in camcorders. You don't hear much about them in the consumer computer market these days. MacBuild should swap these out for DVD/CD-RW, if possible, or DVD-ROM, and sell them separately in the store.
I replicated a ppc linux hard drive from a G3 (or G4?) tower drive, and tried it on an iMac. It didn't work. X failed to start and I couldn't convince it to reconfigure xserver-xorg. The point of the exercise is to produce a replicated hard drive that 'just works', so I abandoned that attempt. I installed a new Edgy in the iMac using the alternate CD, and used that drive to capture the linux directory and boot directory, and save them on the hard drive of the replicator machine. The script genMacDisk will have to be modified to take into account the different installation directories. The nVidia solution, if there is one, will probably need to be captured, too. How many more, I wonder?
I had a false epiphany about replication. Ubuntu has what it terms an OEM installation on the alternate CD, and I thought this might be exploited to do the replication. What I discovered is that the OEM installation does not address the case at hand, and there is relatively little documentation that I can find. The closest stated application is to replicate identical hard drives for volume system sales. That does not apply here, since the case is replicating to a different size hard drive.