Mac OS X Server 1.2v3 on Lombard Powerbook G3

[AppleSOS]

Hi all,
If any open firmware experts could help me out, I'd really appreciate it... I'm trying to get Mac OS X Server 1.2v3 working on a PowerBook G3 Lombard. I can't seem to get around the 256 color limit. I believe this weird GPU incompatibility is also causing Blue Box not to "run" - I just get a grey screen after the boot chime, but I can still quit back into Rhapsody (so I think it is actually running, just without displaying). I have pulled this exact drive out and put it into a PDQ G3 where it works perfectly. As far as I can tell, the GPUs in the two PowerBooks are the same except for the 8mb of vram in the Lombard as opposed to the 4 in the PDQ. I have tried setting the display-family property in dev to 3 as mentioned here by @LightBulbFun, but that does nothing. Obviously, the default driver SHOULD work, because it does in the PDQ, but I think the difference in how the GPUs are references in OpenFirmware is causing some issue. I found that on the PDQ, the display is listed right under the PCI bus: dev screen returns "/pci/ATY,RageLTPro". On the Lombard, dev screen returns "/pci/ATY,LTProParent/264LTProA". As you can see, the naming convention is different, AND it is nested (along with 264LTProB) inside of a parent device. If I mess around with the different parts of the path, I can get it to boot without the screen working, so it appears OS X Server 1.2v3 is smart enough to go down the path to find the display, but just can't figure out the right drivers to use. The problem is, with the properties split between the parent and child display devices, I don't know how to exactly match the properties of the PDQ on the Lombard... I also don't really know what properties are relevant to what I'm trying to do. Any help would be very appreciated. I really need Blue Box and thousands of colors to work on this to be able to use it for what I want to... Attached are pics of the PDQ dev screen properties and the Lombard dev /pci/ATY,LTProParent and dev screen (/pci/ATY,LTProParent/ATY,264LTProA) properties along with dev / tree of the Lombard. Thanks again for taking the time to read!

 

[LightBulbFun]

the difference in device tree layout is because the ATI card in the PDQ is a single head card, it can only drive 1 display/have one frame-buffer at a time (the VGA port is just for mirroring)

but the Lombard is a multiple head card it can drive multiple displays at the same time, the A and B are those 2 ports, its the frame-buffer layout of the card

I have noticed that OS X Server 1.2v3 seems to get a bit frumpy with dual head cards (for example with my NVIDIA GeForce 2MX only 1057.19 ROM works 1100 gives the card 2 heads and OS X server stops booting)



I sadly dont have a Lombard in my collection for me to personally mess around with, but just as a quick curiosity check

see how in name on the Lombard it says "ATY,LTProParent" but on the PDQ it says "ATY,RageLTPro"

what happens if you change the Lombard's ATY,LTProParent to just ATY,RageLTPro and then try and boot MacOS X server?

 

[AppleSOS]

the difference in device tree layout is because the ATI card in the PDQ is a single head card, it can only drive 1 display/have one frame-buffer at a time (the VGA port is just for mirroring)

but the Lombard is a multiple head card it can drive multiple displays at the same time, the A and B are those 2 ports, its the frame-buffer layout of the card

I have noticed that OS X Server 1.2v3 seems to get a bit frumpy with dual head cards (for example with my NVIDIA GeForce 2MX only 1057.19 ROM works 1100 gives the card 2 heads and OS X server stops booting)



I sadly dont have a Lombard in my collection for me to personally mess around with, but just as a quick curiosity check

see how in name on the Lombard it says "ATY,LTProParent" but on the PDQ it says "ATY,RageLTPro"

what happens if you change the Lombard's ATY,LTProParent to just ATY,RageLTPro and then try and boot MacOS X server?

I have tried a decent number of combinations of renaming things... Mostly with the ATY,264LTProA. I am actually not sure if I have just changed the name on the Parent and then changed the devalias screen path to the 264LTProA to have that new name in it. I HAVE tried to point screen alias at the renamed LTProParent, and that causes it to start booting then just go to a blank screen, presumably because it doesn't know where to point go to get the displayed image. I would think. I assume that means it is getting some of the info on the display from the properties in the LTProParent, so I wonder if we can get it to just ignore the other head somehow? I will try what you recommended tomorrow - I accidentally just wiped my CF card with 1.2v3 on it so I have to re-dd the image back onto it. You think the name property is actually what the OS is looking at as it boots to determine which drivers to use? Thanks for the help!

 

[micahgartman]

I've always installed Server to an 'in spec' computer then use Disk Utility to restore it to the PowerBook's HDD.

 

[AppleSOS]

I've always installed Server to an 'in spec' computer then use Disk Utility to restore it to the PowerBook's HDD.

I use an image that I found on a NeXT forum of a preinstalled version with Blue Box already updated to 8.6. I just dd it to whatever drive I'm using. Way easier than fiddling with CD drives and compatibility.



@LightBulbFun I tried renaming the ATY,LTProParent to ATY,RageLTPro and then changing the devalias for screen to have the new name in the path, and the booting curiously hangs at "startup complete". I have been able to reproduce this 3 times, never gotten it to boot. There is one small graphical artifact on the boot window, as well, that is reproduced each time. The same CF card boots just fine without the OF changes. We might be on to something here. I'm wondering if I also rename the ATY,264LTProA to the same thing how it might react. Or, the "compatible" field might be something useful? I haven't had a lot of time to mess with this today... hopefully can experiment more with that tomorrow.

 

[AppleSOS]

@LightBulbFun Did your Pismo running Server 1.2 run BlueBox/MacOS okay? I may have to buy a Pismo for what I want to do here if this keeps fighting me...

 

[AppleSOS]

For anyone that comes upon this later... I ran the very minimal "System Profiler" app for Rhapsody and found a difference in the display color bits between running the same cf card with 1.2v3 installed in my Lombard and in my PDQ. This is little more than a pretty educated guess, but I don't believe it is a driver issue. I think the system is loading the correct driver, but it is seeing something in the display specs that tells it it can't display more than 256 colors because it thinks it won't support it. I have already played around a lot with OpenFirmware modifications, but couldn't find anything that worked. I do believe this is likely an OpenFirmware-fixable issue, but I don't know enough to fix it without a lot more time.

I don't care enough to put that much more time in, because in my experimenting with this, I installed Jaguar on a partition on my Lombard, as well. I hadn't used any pre-panther OS X since I was very, very young (by the time my family was moving off of 9, Tiger was out). I forgot how much some of the little details felt like OpenStep in Aqua on those older OS X releases. So, I started thinking about how different 10.0 and 10.1 could've been from 10.2. And then, I started thinking about the OS X Public Beta, and then I remembered that some of the developer previews had a Platinum interface instead of aqua. I started wondering how those were related to Server 1.X... I'd done a little research on the developer previews in the past, but without actually playing around in them yourself, you don't realize this: DP1 is pretty much just Server 1.0 tuned to run specifically on a B&W G3 (presumably with some of the server tools taken out as well). It was released very shortly afterwards.

DP2 is basically just the "updated for 2000" Rhapsody tuned more for standard/development usage instead of server usage. The finder is a (very nice) mix of OpenStep and Mac OS. It has a slightly simplified NS column browser as well as the classic Mac OS spatial "new window for each folder" navigation. Certain aspects definitely feel like the OS X UI but in Platinum - such as the updated navigation of the preference panes. It retains BlueBox, but it's Mac OS 9! It also - interestingly - has Classic! You have the option to use either to run classic programs. Pretty amazing. And it works on a PowerBook G3 Lombard with thousands of colors.

This DP2 honestly makes Server 1.X seem like they rushed it out the door before it was ready. The goofy UFS requirement is gone - DP2 can be installed on an HFS+ partition: this means that your BlueBox instance can actually see your "Rhapsody" disk! And it runs OS 9 instead of 8.6 - which, by the release of 1.2 in 2000, was kind of crazy for them to leave out. DP2 feels like what Server 1.X should have been.

The way that the history of the OpenStep>Rhapsody>OS X development is often presented sort implies that the pivot to Cocoa/Carbon instead of just YellowBox and BlueBox basically resulted in the canning of Rhapsody and development of OS X 10.0 instead. The fact that both BlueBox AND Classic are on there, seemingly running off of the same image, makes me think that is a major exaggeration. It seems to me they just took where they were already going with Rhapsody and tacked on Carbon - rewriting the Core of the OS enough so that the newly-updated-from-YellowBox Cocoa would play nicely with Carbon. I wonder what the first DP build with "Carbon and Cocoa" underneath was? But, I digress.