Reply-To: Fabio.Riccardi@inria.fr
Originator: linux-pmac@samba.anu.edu.au
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From: Fabio Riccardi <Fabio.Riccardi@inria.fr>
To: Multiple recipients of list <linux-pmac@arvidsjaur.anu.edu.au>
Subject: Announcing Linux for PowerBook 3400
X-Comment: Discussion of native Linux on PCI Powermacs
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date:   Tue, 12 Aug 1997 04:50:05 +0000

Hi everybody!

I'm proud to announce a first public release of:


                        Linux for PowerBook 3400
                        ------------------------


This is a fairly usable system, it includes a version of the
linux-pmac 2.1.24 kernel, with a working ethernet driver, a 16 bit
color display driver, and an Xserver - that is you have what you need
to make what probably is the fastest portable unix workstation ever :^)

The ethernet driver is a sort of miracle... it just happened that the
default Tulip driver that comes with linux-pmac recognized my
card... I had to update it a bit to make it work for real...

The display driver is a clean of hack. The PB3400 comes with a nasty
Chips and Technologies 65550 VGA-compatible display adapter, the most
complicated thing I've ever seen in my life... Notwithstanding all my
efforts, I haven't been able to figure out where Apple has hidden the
65550's io ports... therefore part of the initialization is performed
at boot time (prom.c), using Open Firmware. It works very well, you
get a 15bpp truecolor display, which looks very nice...

One drawback of the truecolor display is that the linux console
characters appear a bit dim (black, white and gray), as soon as I
figure out how to use better colors I'll put them in the display, in
the meantime you better use X...

Unsupported stuff: media bay (including the floppy), PC cards, power
management (your linux PB won't sleep).

You will find the required stuff at:

        http://www-sor.inria.fr/~riccardi/linux

together with some primitive installation instructions...

Enjoy!

        Fabio

-- 
Fabio Riccardi - INRIA, Project SOR  |
email : Fabio.Riccardi@inria.fr      | * time is on our side! *
http://www-sor.inria.fr/~riccardi/   |