Awhile ago I posted on this list asking questions regarding getting
NetBSD to work on my PowerBook G3.  I didn't end up with much success,
until now.  I've just managed to install the latest SNAP (20000205).

For reference the machine is:
Apple PowerBook G3 PDQ model with 512K cache, 233MHz CPU, and 12.1" screen

Unlike previous versions of the installer I tried, this one recognised
my Media Bay hard disk which allowed me to install onto a drive other
than the internal one.

One strange thing though is that while the internal hard disk in on ATA
bus 0, and the external one is on ATA bus 1 the kernel sees the internal
drive at wd1 and the media bay drive as wd0.  Something that made me
double check a few times before installing over my Mac partitions!

While I could previously install on the internal hard disk, I could then
never get it to boot. The solution to this is to use the Apple System
disk utility as mentioned in the recent email regarding booking on a
beige g3.  This utility deletes references to ata0 & ata1 as shown by
devalias and replaces them with ide & ide1.  To boot from the media bay
drive all I need to do is the following:
boot ide1/disk@0:0

One thing that I noticed though is that when the kernel is configuring
devices and gets to the point of configuring the screen the brightness
is reduced by many orders off magnitude.  Booting from the install
floppy didn't do this.

Finally I don't have to use LinuxPPC.   thanks guy's!


Matt.