Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Ok, making progress, getting comfortable with the GUI and built-in applications.

I am curious about this: Is there a "sleep" functionality? I closed the lid of the PowerBook, and the display remained on, and the whole system froze. I suspect that my hardware is designed in such a way that when the display latch hooks in and the sleep sensor is actuated, it triggers some type of hardware event, but can't be certain what it's doing. What do I have to do to get sleep functioning properly? Ideally, of course, it'd be nice to turn off the display and spin down the hard disk (at minimum) when the lid is closed, if that can be somehow configured. Any ideas?

[dibl]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

This may be where your choice of a 4-year old version ends up biting you.

As I recall in KDE 3, you need to install a package called kpowersave, and then fiddle with the configuration there.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

I'm having all kinds of silly issues here. I'm going to give 6.10 (Edge Eft) a shot, as this is the last one with a PowerPC build.

[sithlord48]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

I'm having all kinds of silly issues here. I'm going to give 6.10 (Edge Eft) a shot, as this is the last one with a PowerPC build.

not completely true... you can use newer version of ubuntu and xubuntu as they have ppc builds.. not sure if there is a kubuntu-desktop package for the newer ppc builds...

[dibl]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Google turned this up:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/rele...aunty/release/

which indicates that you could go at least to 9.04. Assuming the repos are intact, after you install Ubuntu, install the meta-package kubuntu-desktop and you'll have your KDE.

[Snowhog]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

There's a Karmic release for the PPC as well:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/karmic/release/

[sithlord48]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

yes it was not to long ago i was trying to get xubuntu to work on my G3 B&W (its a ppc ), trying ubuntu 9.10 and xubuntu 9.10 but i was not able to find a kubuntu ppc build.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Hmm - I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the links!

I had a minor, scary setback today. I tried booting to the Kubuntu 6.10 installation, and the kernel dropped to a shell and wouldn't mount the installer CD. From that point forward, my PowerBook would not read any CD-ROM at all. It reported that the CD was not readable and needed to be formatted. This would happen with both the Mac OS and Kubuntu OS.

I tried all manner of removing batteries, and peripherals, resetting PRAM, etc, with no change. Finally I tested to see if the Mac OS would play a regular music CD, and it did...... so I thought this was less likely a hardware issue and maybe a strange firmware issue.

I booted to Open Firmware (took me a few tries.) What I had to do was power down, hold down Option+COmmand+O+F while pressing power button to get in.

I then typed the following commands, return after each one

init-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all

Computer rebooted and all was well.

My understanding is that the first line, "init-nvram" is the old world ROM command, and the new world ROM command is reset-nvram (FYI for those with newer-than-13-year-old PowerBooks)

This setback threw me off today, so I may try the 6.10 build tomorrow. I'm really not attached to the KDE interface per-se. I could try other interfaces. I'll do more research on Ubuntu 9.10 PPC build to see if it's possible with my hardware or not.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Ok, I'm going to give Xubuntu 9.10 a shot tomorrow. It looks like the alternate install disc should do the trick for my low-ram system.

I'll report back the results

I can't thank you enough for everyone's help. I've tinkered with Debian and Red Hat Linux about 10 years ago, making my AMD K6 166 MHz machine do things that you'd never hope Windows 95 could do. Things have come a long way! I'm digging the community and the eagerness to share help with each other. I appreciate it!

[Snowhog]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

That's what we're here for. Let us know how it goes - or doesn't go.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Crap. The same silly CD-ROM read issue is happening again. No amount of resetting OF is working.

I think my CD-ROM drive has a hardware issue. I don't suspect a faulty IDE controller as the IDE HDD works fine..... though I guess that's still a remote possibility... ?

I'm going to track down another known-good 3400c CD-ROM drive and test. I only know 1 person with one, and it may take a while to get the drive for testing. I'll let you know the results.

In the meantime, I do have USB functionality on OS 9 with a CardBus USB 2.0 card. Can I install it using a flash drive? I think I can, I'll look into this further.

[dibl]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

In the meantime, I do have USB functionality on OS 9 with a CardBus USB 2.0 card. Can I install it using a flash drive?

Sure can, using this or other guides. Might be a bit tricky, since you can't boot a CD. But if you have gparted on your Mac OS, and "dd" and such, it should be feasible to make a bootable USB card or stick.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Well, I had nothing to lose with my failed CD-ROM drive. I couldn't find a replacement to test with, but I figured maybe the lens just needed to be aligned.

It was a COMPLETE shot in the dark, but, I disassembled the whole CD-ROM drive (which was a pain because of one stubborn stripped screw. I had to bend up metal around it to gain access to the teweaker alignment screw) and turned a screw near the lens that looked promising. I turned it right 1/2 turn. I reassembled the whole thing, tah dah! CD-ROM works now

CD-ROM tray has issues ejecting now, kinda have to pry it open with your finger. BUT......seriously.......not complaining right now.

I finished installing Xubuntu 9.10 with some hiccups but after 2-3 tries of burning the installation media, I got a good install with no corrupt file errors. However there's no GUI when I boot, just the ubuntu command prompt.

I'm working on that. More on this later.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Ok, having some issues, so I'll start from the top:

1.) Downloaded/burned Xubuntu 9.10-alternate-powerpc.iso.

2.) Put this CD in my PowerBook 3400c and booted to OS 9.1.

3.) Copied /install/powerpc/vmlinux kernel to OS 9 ::System Folder::Linux Kernels. (replacing old Breezy Badger one)

4.) Copied /install/powerpc/initrd.gz to OS 9 ::System Folder. Trashed old Breezy Badger one and renamed new one ramdisk.image.gz

5.) Opened Boot X Control Panel. Removed Root arguments to leave it blank. Clicked Linux - CD installation began.

6.) Deleted the hda10 (ext2) and hda11 (swap) partitions.

7.) Told installer to install Xubuntu on the largest continuous free space.

8.) Install went through, very similarly to the Breezy Badger one. I did not see any options for customizing the OS, or GUI.

9.) When prompted that there is no boot loader, pressed Option + F2 to go to shell.

10.) Typed following commands, return after each one (hda9 is my Mac OS 9 partition)
cd /target
mkdir hfs
mount /dev/hda9 hfs -t hfsplus
echo '/dev/hda9 /hfs hfsplus defaults' >> etc/fstab
cp boot/vmlinux hfs/System\ Folder/Linux\ Kernels/vmlinux
cp boot/initrd.img hfs/System\ Folder/ramdisk.image.gz

11.) Pressed Option + F2 to go back to installer. Finished install, rebooted.

12.) Boot X control panel shows up again. The Xubuntu installer seemed to create the following partitions:
-- /dev/hda10 - about 30 megabytes, ext2 format, mounted on /boot
-- /dev/hda11 - about 33 gigabytes, ext4 format, mounted on /
Because I assumed that my primary installation was on /dev/hda11, I add the following to the kernel arguments field for the root in Boot X:

root=/dev/hda11

11.) Clicked Linux -- Boot seemed to proceed, though stayed in a terminal window. I was prompted to log in to Ubuntu, and no GUI showed up.
-- I could not see any anomalies or errors in the text preceeding this.

12.) I tried following this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=616276
So I entered the following into the terminal:

sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-core
sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop
sudo startx

NOTE: The first two command above seemed successful, but they consistently said 0B downloaded, 0B updated, 0B installed, etc..... like it was not actually installing anything. When I tried to run startx, I got 10 lines of backtrace, followed by

Saw signal 7. Server aborting.
ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log
ddxSigGiveUp: re-raising 7
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

13.) Following the above linked thread, I put my install CD in, and typed the following:

sudo nano -B /etc/apt/sources.list

I then removed the "#" from the line # deb cdrom:[Xubuntu 9.10 _....
I then saved, and quit

14.) I ran the following commands:

mount -rv /media/cdrom
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

The second-to-last command took about 20 minutes, as it was rigorously installing something from the CD-ROM. The last command took a few minutes as well, but seemed successful.

15.) Ran this command:

startxfce4

Similar failures to startx. I see:

Saw signal 7. Server aborting.
ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log
ddxSigGiveUp: re-raising 7
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

So I'm kinda, lost. I posted in the ubuntu forum under Xubuntu category, but no one's responded as that forum is about 50 times busier than this one. Any ideas?

[dibl]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

This an absolute WAG, but the Xfce on one of my netbooks runs under GDM, which you would start with

sudo service gdm start