Linux on PowerPC FAQ-O-Matic : Trash :
BootX resets the screen then hangs | |
This situation only occurs when booting with BootX, not with Open Firmware. If
you are having trouble booting with Open Firmware, then try BootX (available at
ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/linux-pmac/BootX_1.0b3.sit ). It is generally a much
easier way to boot the kernel or installer.
The problem occurs after the "linux" button is pressed in the BootX dialog. The video system appears to reset, leaving a screen full of garbage (on my 7600 it consists of colourful stripes). This happens during a successful boot too, presumably due to the delay between BootX handing control to the kernel and the kernel taking interest in the display. The problem is that the boot process then hangs, before the kernel clears the display.
This can happen if the kernel image BootX is loading has been corrupted.
BootX tries to boot the kernel image (vmlinux) placed in the BootX folder or the
Mac system folder, and this file can be corrupted while it is being copied to
the Mac partition. The kernel image can be corrupted if it is downloaded by FTP
with a client set to text mode, or if it is copied from a linux partition using
the LinuxDisks utility. There many other ways to corrupt a file, but these are
probably the most likely. To ensure you have a correct copy of the kernel
image, download it in binary mode with an trustworthy FTP client (Fetch and
recent versions of Netscape are the only ones I can vouch for under MacOS), or
mount the HFS partition under linux and copy your kernel image across partitions
that way (to do this you need to have linux installed already, of course). | |
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