First, I want to tip my hat to the hard-working maintainers of the Mac68k
port.  Obviously, a lot of work has gone into this system; it's been really
worthwhile and educational on my part, playing sysadmin and learning more
about un*x every day.

Part of the learning, of course, involves confronting brick walls and blind
alleys occasionally. :-)  I sought to bring up color X on my machine this
weekend, to compare and contrast with the Linux and HPUX boxes I use at
work.  My machine:  IIci, 20MB RAM, TFB video, Asante MacCon ethernet card,
Apple ext. II kbd, Apple ADB mouse, and three 80MB hard drives. :-)  I'm
waiting for a large SCSI drive, but meanwhile, why not use all those spare
drives lurking around the house?  The drives are at SCSI 0 [internal], 1,
and 3; cables are short and only the last drive in the external chain is
terminated.  I mention this in case it applies to one of my problems.  I
successfully installed and am using GENERIC#56 from the 1.3 archives, with
the Jan. 1 base binaries.

OK, I installed the basic b/w X tarballs via the MacOS installer.  After
belatedly remembering to set up ld.so.conf, the X server found its shared
libraries and voila!  I was up and running in X, unfortunately with the twm
window manager. :-) I managed to install fvwm2 and though it looks wretched
in b/w, it works a lot better.

Emboldened by my success, I decided to go for broke and install the SLOTMAN
kernel and OSFA color X server.  At this point, having the ability to
select the active kernel from the booter is a lifesaver.  I booted Paul's
latest SLOTMAN-HWD-NCR, but forgot to put the Mac in color mode.  It did
boot to userspace without a fuss.  Just for grins, I softlinked X ->
Xmac68k.OSFA and invoked startx; the OSFA server failed to connect, giving
socket errors, and finally gave up.  This may be a separate problem.

I rebooted to MacOS, told the booter to leave me in 256 color mode, and
booted NetBSD.  SLOTMAN hung as it was trying to mount the root partition.
Trying again, it made it to the /usr partition before hanging.  SCSI
problems?

Trying a different tack, I booted the HWDIRECT#61 kernel while leaving the
display in 8-bit color.  It thought the Mac was in monochrome mode, but
booted to userspace.  Must not be a problem with the video card. :-)

I tried a few other things for completeness, but didn't learn anything
useful.  It's really late, or I'd keep hammering at it for a while longer.
I plan to keep at this tomorrow till I get it working.  A couple of
questions: (the answers might be obvious if I had more sleep last night :-)

1) Did I goof in using SLOTMAN in 8-bit mode?  I thought it should boot OK.
Or is it possibly the SCSI driver, since it hung while trying to mount
partitions from my three SCSI drives?  Should I try the SBC SLOTMAN?

2) Does the OSFA X server work in 1- or 8-bit modes?  I thought I deduced
that it did, from the FAQs.

3) Should I install the video LKM with a GENERIC or HWDIRECT kernel, and
avoid the OSF X server?  Does the OSFA require a HWDIRECT kernel?

I'll probably figure this out after a few hours of combinations and
permutations, but if anyone can enlighten me as to what I've done wrong in
the creation of this long boring discourse :-) I'd be grateful.

--
| Greg Dunn                       | Every year is getting shorter,    |
| gregdunn@indy.net               | never seem to find the time       |
| GregDunn@aol.com                | Plans that either come to nought  |
| GregDunn@compuserve.com         | or half a page of scribbled lines |
| http://members.aol.com/gregdunn |                  Pink Floyd       |