>< System details:
>< PowerBook 145 that's had radical brain-surgery - It's been various
>< machines through the years, but nowdays, gestalt (and every other method
>< I know to throw at it) says that it's a PowerBook 170.
>
>Is the onboard video supported on either of these machines? Last I
>heard it wasn't.

Well, FWIW, when I go for the actual boot, after the booter does it's
"bye-bye" routine, and the actual NetBSD boot sequence fires, I get good
video right up to the "panic". Would that be an indication? (no, not being
a smart-ass... for all I know, the boot process uses the Mac video stuff
until the line before the first shell prompt, then switches over to a
driver that creates images using formations of trained fleas guided by
smoke signals - maybe I just need a new batch of fleas or a different kind
of smoke? :) )

But seriously...
To double-check, I just hit http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/ and about
the third line from the bottom of the list of supported hardware, I'm
seeing the 170 specifically listed as being supported starting with release
1.4. No indication of possible problems listed.

In terms of "what's this machine?", I'm feeling fairly safe in calling it a
"full" 170 - At the very least, that's what a call to gestalt says, as well
as every other method I know about for programattically checking machine
type. The 145 guts out of it are long gone. The only 145 hardware left in
the case is the keyboard, trackball and the actual LCD module. Everything
else (motherboard, processor board, RAM board [those were interchangable
between the 145 and 170 anyway], speaker/PRAM battery board, and the LCD
high-voltage supply/driver board) has long since been swapped out for parts
from a 170.

If I've understod things correctly in my hacking and swapping, when you get
right down to to where the rubber meets the road, the only difference
between the two machines was the processor board anyway - the 145 had
either a 16 or 25 Mhz (I've forgotten which) 68030, with no FPU chip (just
an empty set of contacts where one could be soldered in if you were good
with an iron and didn't care about voiding your warranty), the 170 has a
33Mhz 68030, with an FPU chip installed on the contacts that are empty on
the 145. According to what I've read (and what I can remember seeing from a
visual inspection) the only other difference between them was the clock
crystal. Even the ROMs are (supposedly...) the same on the two machines.

As things stand right now, I've reformatted the root/usr partition with
mkfs, and as I'm typing this, the machine is rattling the drive in the
process of re-installing the base, etc, and kern tarballs. I've also got a
download of the base/etc/kern tarballs for version 1.5 working in the
background. If my re-install of the 1.5.2 version doesn't boot, I'm going
to try the 1.5 set and see what happens. If *THAT* doesn't work, I haven't
decided if I'm going to try the 1.4 release, or just scrap the project.
Guess I'll figure that out if/when I get to that stage.



Don Bruder -  dakidd@sonic.net      <--- Preferred Email - unmunged
I will choose a path that's clear: I will choose Free Will! - N. Peart