I'm having problems installing LinuxPPC on my PowerCenter Pro 210.

As per instructions, I made a boot floppy containing installer.coff (and
I reformatted the floppy first). I set up my boot variables, using kbd
and screen as input-device and output-device respectively. I then
rebooted from the floppy. My monitor's green light comes on for a few
seconds, then goes off. There's some disk activity on the floppy for
about 30 seconds, then - nada! Black screen, no disk activity.

I looked in the FAQmatic, and there's an entry suggesting a couple of
variants for the output-device name (one of which is supposed to have
originated from a PowerCenter user). I try both of these, but still no
joy (in fact, with one of them I don't even get the activity on the
floppy).

I sit back and think for a bit. It occurs to me that I have a Techworks
3dfx card installed, and my monitor connects to it through a
pass-through cable connected to the card. Is it possible that this is
screwing up OF? So I disconnect the monitor from the 3dfx card and hook
it up as normal. I then retry all the above permutations - still zip!

I'm about ready to turn the LinuxPPC CD into performance art by dipping
it into a vat of Linus Torvald's urine! My PRAM has been zapped more
often than the Millenium Falcon. If anyone out there has successfully
installed on a PowerCenter Pro 210, can they post their boot variable
settings here? Could there be some other problem than the boot
variables?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Chris

In article <35772670.C2B1F...@enterprise.net>,
Chris Walsh  <cdwa...@enterprise.net> wrote:

Well, it probably isn't screwing up OF, but it won't be seen as the
output screen unless you specify it. If it does have OF initialization
routines in it, you can try using it by setting the screen variable to
point to it, by looking around in the device tree (once you get into OF
somehow or another).

First off, try just getting into OF without trying to boot off of anything;
turn off auto-boot, and set input-device to kbd. Also, make sure you don't
have a modem turned on connected to the serial port.

For output device, with the monitor connected to the built-in video, use:

/bandit/ATY,mach64_3D_pc

actually, I use "screen", and put in the nvramrc slot:

devalias screen /bandit/ATY,mach64_3D_pcc

I assume that's the device you've been specifying.

If you still can't get it to work right, connect up a serial port to
another computer or a dumb terminal at 38400 (I think), and set input
and output to ttya (which is the default), then try to boot into OF.

The PowerCenterPro has an annoying feature: the version of OF always
resets itself to default whenever it boots to MacOS. Otherwise, you
could just set it to kbd/screen and go to OF anytime by booting with
Cmd-Option-O-F (which works fine on my APS machine, for example). The
PCP defaults to using the modem serial port as the console.

The other problem with the PCP is that "screen" doesn't automatically get
set to anything useful. You should just be able to set output device to
screen and have it work (it should look for the first appropriate device
it can find, if there is no screen alias defined). At least kbd works!