At 3:03 PM -0500 7/27/01, David Burgess wrote:
>Even with an FTP program that understands MacBinary, the question is
>still "... and then what?"  I have the macutils and xbin packages
>both installed on my primary home server, so I can deal with the
>.bin stuff.  The .hqx and .sea extensions still have me perplexed.
>
>So far, the assumption seems to be that, once I've un-binhexxed
>the files, they will just magically fly through the air to exactly
>where they need to go.  This isn't a one-button kind of operation.
>
>I did manage to get the "Disk Tools for the PPC" onto a floppy image
>which I then DDed to a floppy to boot with.  I can now bring up
>MacOS (which seems a huge step backwards).

Maybe, but it's probably necessary for proper care and feeding of Mac 
hardware.  You may want a similar boot floppy with the network 
support installed.  I've always kept a small maintenance partition on 
a disk somewhere with some disk and network utilities.  In this day 
and age that would include an ftp client like Fetch or Anarchie, 
Drive Setup, Disk First Aid, DiskCopy 6.x, SystemDisk or BootVars, 
and maybe even Netscape.

A quick way to get a bootable disk partition would be to format the 
drive with Drive Setup and then copy the entire contents of the Disk 
Tools floppy to the partition.  Somewhere I think there's a bootable 
floppy with network support built in.  Copying that floppy's contents 
would be a better starting point.

An FTP client running under MacOS that understands MacBinary and/or 
.hqx files will properly reconstitute them on a Macintosh file 
system.  This means setting the file type and creator code (not part 
of the file or file name, but attributes stored in the directory for 
that file).  This means properly separating the data in the resource 
fork from the data fork of that file.  If this is done properly then 
Mac applications will not only be executable, they will passively 
tell the OS what files are owned by them, what file types it knows 
about and what icons to display on the GUI for those files.

This may not qualify as flying to where they need to go, but at least 
it should be where you can drag (pun intended) the file to where it 
needs to go.  If you've never used MacOS then you may need to be told 
that icons are files, windows and folders are directories.  Dragging 
an icon is a cp or mv operation.  Double-clicking a folder or 
single-clicking a window is a cd.  I'm told this isn't true in 
Windows, which boggles my mind.  We won't talk about X.

A .sea file is a "self extracting archive".  It's a Mac application 
that will reconstruct some collection of Mac files when run.  It may 
in turn be packaged as a .bin or .hqx for transport via "barbarian" 
OS's like Unix or M$ which have neither creator codes nor resource 
forks in their filesystems.

I hope I'm not insulting you, but you sound like a bright guy with no 
experience whatever with MacOS.

>3)  Both 7600's are in a more 'advanced' video mode than the monitor
>I want to use.  I found a reference to the "Apple" icon, followed by
>"Audio and Video" settings.  Right now, the screen appears to sit more
>or less 'side-by-side'.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.  See other post.  Monitor 
*must* support 640 X 480 @ 66-67 Hz, the fixed frequency/resolution 
of the original Mac II color monitor.  It was actually a damn good 
monitor for the time (.25mm dot pitch, 700 X 512 @ 67 Hz if you got 
the right OS mods installed).  You can get them used for really 
cheap, like $25.

The 7600 video hardware supports other resolutions/frequencies 
including most of the standard *VGA ones under MacOS with an 
appropriate adapter plug.  Not under netbsd or OF though.

>4)  It is not possible to 'start' NetBSD without at least one working
>computer already available.  Apparently, this working computer will
>need to be a Mac as well.

Actually I think you can do what you need to do from the iso CD-ROM 
if you never want to run MacOS.  Of course you need a working monitor 
if you don't want to run headless in netbsd.

a) Get into Open Firmware.  (Needs a terminal on one of the serial 
ports, or else a whole bunch of MacOS infrastructure.)

b) setenv auto-boot? false so you don't accidentally boot MacOS and 
have to start configuring OF all over again.

c) Use nvedit to fix up nvramrc.  There are instructions off the FAQ 
somewhere.  It's a bit tedious, but not hard.  You'll want the wBoot 
patch and the video patch.  The other patches aren't needed on a 
[78]500 in my experience.  7600 should be the same.  Sometimes you 
get lucky and don't need the video patch for a particular machine, 
but don't count on it.

d) Set the other variables like it says in the INSTALL notes for an 
OF 1.0.5 machine.

e) "boot scsi-int/sd@3:0,ofwboot.xcf netbsd.macppc" with the real 
genuine NetBSD iso CD-ROM in the drive.  Accept no substitutes! 
(Actually for this machine you can use a vanilla ISO 9660 CD-ROM, but 
I'd suggest you use the NetBSD image anyway.)

f)  Allow sysinst to format your disk.  This will replace the Apple 
Partition Map with a dummy one that can boot the machine and put a 
native NetBSD disklabel on the disk.  If you don't have/want MacOS 
then sysinst is your friend.  (Otherwise it's kind of a pain because 
it won't partition the disk the way I want.)

>Point 2 needs some more explanation.  I have gotten the OF interface
>working, as well as the MacOS fixit disk.  How do I use the .smi
>image to patch 1.0.5?

This is a "self mounting image" of a disk which can be mounted by the 
DiskCopy 6.x program under MacOS.  (DiskCopy 4.x has been current for 
a long time but won't handle this function).  Once the image is 
mounted as a pseudo disk you can drag the contents to a floppy.

>My choices are:
>
>	a)  Copy it onto an MS-DOS floppy as a program.
>	b)  Use one of the macutils to put it onto a floppy.
>	c)  'dd' it onto a floppy.
>	d)  Some other 'if you had a Mac you'd understand' thing.
>
>One of the other "interesting" things that I've run across is that
>the "Disk Tools" disk won't eject once I've booted from it.  This
>makes it really hard to put additional software onto the server.  I'm
>sure that part of the problem is that I can't actually read anything
>on the screen clearly.

Eject under the Special menu should eject the floppy (if the floppy 
icon is selected with a single-click first).  Of course the OS may do 
some cleanup after the eject that uses code that hasn't been loaded 
so it needs to reload the floppy to load that code.  It should work 
the second or third time you try though.  In fact a Mac should still 
be perfectly usable with just a single floppy drive (as long as you 
consider hand-loading a floppy to be an acceptable substitute for a 
disk seek operation ;-).

>I've been working with Mike Wolfson, who has been a real help on this,
>but I'm still unclear on at least part of the basic concept.  As we
>get closer and closer, I'll be making some suggestions about how to
>actually make the PPC part better.
>
> > > I haven't even started on that one yet.  I'm a little perplexed as to the
> > > usability of a lap top computer where you can't use the screen that comes
> > > with it....
>
>Rephrase that to "where you can't use the screen ...." to "where you
>need another computer to run a program on it."   Right now, it looks
>like I'm going to need about $1000 worth of computer to run programs
>on a old, slow Mac with 8 Meg of memory.

Well lots of people use laptops with broken screens as headless 
servers.  In this case the screen was broken by the software instead 
of contact with pavement of course.  Surely you can use a $200 PC 
instead of a $1000 one though. ;-)

> >
> >     Feel free to write a video driver. AFAIK it's unknown, unsupported, and
> > undocumented.
>
>Thanks for your permission.  I was wondering who'd approve that.
>
>I've been curious about this for a couple of days now.  Is the video
>completely useless (as in, no text-only display mode) or is it just
>that there is no extended (graphics) mode?

I suspect it's that no text display mode exists.  Period.  It wasn't 
until Open Firmware that Mac's ever had a text mode that wasn't 
implemented on top of the graphics mode.  This was a revolutionary 
innovation that was carefully hidden from all but the most determined 
technogeeks, like us.  Back to the original subject:  I presume the 
graphics (as in dumb frame buffer) isn't supported yet.

The port-mac68k booter does have a serial console mode, just like 
Open Firmware.


Cross my heart, strike me dead, stick a lobster on my head.
John Crichton -- Farscape, 6/15/01
h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu