On 12/11/2002 05:30:10 PM CST Eric Damien Berna wrote:
>
>At 2:02 PM -0800 12/11/02, Ben Jansen wrote:
>>The G3 has OF 2.4 so this should work, shouldn't it?
>
>Nope.  OF 2.4 doesn't work. Every few months somebody (including me)
>tries to get an OF 2.4 beige G3 to work, and asks about it on this
>list.  I've never seen a report of success booting NetBSD on an OF
>2.4 beige G3.  My solution was to switch to an 8500 with a G4
>processor, the SCSI card from the beige G3, and a Rage 128 card.

Ok, I can provide a small success story, although it's not completely
satisfying.

My beige G3 2.4 OF once booted MacOS 8, Linux and Darwin 1.3. Linux
only worked with BootX. It didn't boot directly from OF and my tries
in this direction were unsuccessful.

I tried to boot ofwboot.xcf over floppy, cd, and enet. It didn't
work. I then most of the time only tried booting over enet since this
was easiest.

Booting gave me something like
loading text ...
loading data ...
loading bss ...
CLAIM FAILED

It somehow loaded ofwboot.xcf but then it failed starting it. It
apparently dies before starting ofwboot.xcf, since an endless loop
added at the ofwboot.xcf entry point didn't give a different
result. (I expected the computer to hang and no "CLAIM FAILED".)

I was finally convinced that I won't ever see netbsd running on this
machine.

Some time later I tried to update the Darwin 1.3 to 1.4. You cannot
"update" Darwin, so I did a fresh install of 1.4 to the 1.3
partition.

This installation in fact never worked. Booting it gave me the
colorful circle cursor forever and nothing happened.

I installed it again and now booting it gives a OF error "DEFAULT CATCH
something".

And _now_, if I "boot enet", ofwboot.xcf gets loaded correctly,
starts, and I was able to install netbsd on the spare partition, I
reserved long time ago...

If I try to "boot enet" before the DEFAULT CATCH happened
(e.g. setting it as boot-device or aborting the boot with C-O-F), it
still doesn't boot.

As I think I've read here on the ml, the darwin installed OF script,
probably fixes something up after a DEFAULT CATCH which enables the
netbsd booter to boot. I don't understand what it does (forth is a
different form of Chinese to me *) ), but I will help someone more
involved to find out what exactly it is.

The story is not completely satisfying, since Darwin is not working. I
have the strong feeling, that if I try and fiddle until Darwin works,
netbsd won't boot anymore (no DEFAULT CATCH when booting Darwin).

regards,
chris


*) to Chinese people: please replace the term "Chinese" with the term
 "Suaheli" :-)