Choice of Operating Systems

Why not stick with Mac OS 7.6.1? There's a site on the net devoted to running System 7 on older Mac hardware and yet still "get along" with other modern systems. I'm intrigued, it looks cute. I'll probably give this a go sometime. Check out http://main.system7today.com/ and http://www.macdrivermuseum.net/

Mac OS 8.0? You've got to be kidding. How that half-finished chunk of shit ever escaped the labs at Apple, I'll never know.

Mac OS 8.1? That's what I used to run on my TAM. I'm looking for something more capable, that's all.

Mac OS 8.5? 8.6? 9? Ahh, and here's where it all goes to hell. The TAM has some decidedly odd hardware in it, and with every subsequent release of Mac OS, it was supported less well. Eventually, it got so bad one would be afraid of touching the volume control for fear of getting blown into the next room by the Bose sound system. Sounds great, if only we could control the damn thing...

BSD? That's what I wanted to run. But the open firmware video support (necessitated by some bizarre hardware) isn't quite up to snuff, and you'll wind up having to use a serial port as your console. No fun. Although, I really want to go back to BSD, so maybe I'll try this some day.

Why Is This Hard?

Well, for a few reasons...

Video: Okay, the video is built from an ATI 3D Rage II processor with 2MB of VRAM, connected to an 800x600 LCD screen. Straightforward, right? Suuuuuuure, except that the system lies to you. The video system only works in 800x600, but open firmware merrily indicates to the OS it hosts that, sure, go ahead and start up in 640x480 mode. Which never works, and leaves you without a console. Stare at that blank screen while the kernel churns away underneath you. And if a mere text console is hard, I bet you can't wait for XFree86 to get in on the act. Fun fun fun!

Audio: Sure, one of the reasons you bought this puppy, right? Sounds great, except that the hardware audio mixer is not like any of the other mixers Apple spec'd in their Macs. Which means that your volume control for things like, say, the CD player is either off or BLARING. Basically, the bottom 60% or so of the volume range is completely silent; once you get to 61% (or whatever the number actually is), it comes on full blast. Fortunately, this insanity only affects the CD-ROM, FM Radio, and TV Tuner portions of the system; the DSP seems to be controlled normally, so you can at least decode and play sound files at normal volume.

Tuners: The TAM has a built in TV Tuner and FM Radio. Which, of course, no one knows anything about. They've got to be somewhat standard, one of these days I'll prod them a bit and see if there's a driver that understands them under Linux or BSD systems.

Some people will try to convince you that a TAM is just a PowerMac 5400/5500/6400/6500 mounted on its side, with some parts from a PowerBook 3400 thrown in. Don't listen to these people; they don't own one and don't know what they're talking about. Those people are quoting Apple's documentation at you, which any fool can do. Yes, it's an Alchemy or Gazelle motherboard, but it's not just like the other PowerMacs and it won't "just work" like the other systems do.

For example: Here's a wonderful summary of the TAM. Each sites purports to tell you everything you need to know about one. If you want to see the system with its Bose soundsystem, or the vertically mounted CD-ROM, or the leather palmrests on the keyboard, go to one of the following links. When you're done giggling at how many different sites can't even get the basic facts consistent, come on back here.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
• http://lowendmac.com/ppc/tam.shtml
• http://tam.axon.net/
• http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=112418

Which Linux?

I've installed and tried the following systems. Currently, I've found Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 to be the most effective distro for the TAM. I do plan to upgrade to later releases of YDL, but I'm in no hurry right now. Everything's finally working (to some degree), and I know that upgrading to a 2.4 kernel is going to break some things.

Anyway. Here are the systems I've tried. In all cases, I've used BootX. I know people complain that it isn't "clean" in the way it leaves the hardware when Linux is loaded after Mac OS; but, to be honest, the only place this has ever bitten me is in the ADB keyboard's caps lock key (see "Problems" below on dealing with this). All of the following systems either have flaky video, or lack support for a major piece of the system (like, say, the SCSI controller) you'll need for the install.

• Debian 3.1r4
• Mandrake 10.1
• YDL 4.0.1
• YDL 4.1

Even YDL 3.0.1 wasn't perfect. Though it seems to support the TAM very well, I still couldn't use the Farallon Comm Slot II ethernet card with it. Eventually, I gave up and grabbed a PCI based ethernet card for it. Later versions of YDL work with the CSII card, so I'm guessing that at a later date, if I upgrade the system and fix the video drivers, I'll have a pretty good setup.

My Hardware

Here's my system. This is what worked for me.

• 128 MB RAM
• 4 MB L2 Cache DIMM
• 6 GB disk from an old PowerBook.
• Belkin (Realtek) 10/100 PCI Ethernet card
• Farallon 10/100 Comm Slot II Ethernet card (not used at present)

Mac OS Setup

Set up a 256 MB partition on your disk to hold some version of Mac OS. In this, install BootX.

From the 3 YDL 3.0.1 CD-ROMs, get the first one. Mount it under Mac OS, and look for two kernels and a ramdisk image. You'll need both kernels! One is labeled with "BOOT" in its name, the other isn't. Place both of them in your Linux Kernels directory. Store the ramdisk image somewhere sane.

Run BootX. Clear the kernel arguments line, you won't need to specify anything for YDL 3.0.1. Under Options point it at the ramdisk image you copied off the CD. Choose the ...BOOT kernel. Check the No Video Driver option (so the system will use the Open Firmware framework). Leave the Ramdisk size at 8K.

Note: If you're trying to use one of the other distros, and you're working with a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel, do not check the No Video Driver option. Leave it clear, and instead, supply video=atyfb:vmode:10,cmode:8 as a kernel argument. The color bit depth, set by cmode in that line, can be 8 or 16. There isn't one value that works best for all distros, so be prepared to try both.

Installing YDL Linux

Everything's pretty normal here. As far as your disk partitions goes, give yourself 256 MB for a swap partition, and set aside some chunk of the disk for /home accounts. Use the rest for the root filesystem. Since we're using BootX and not quik, there's no reason not to use ext3 for those filesystems.

Go through the installation. It'll take a couple hours to grind through all three CD's.

Eventually, you'll need to reboot. When you do this, there are two changes to make in BootX. Don't forget this!

1. Change your kernel from the ...BOOT variant to the other "plainly" named one.
2. Kill your ramdisk, and select the partition that holds your root filesystem. This is probably something like "hda6" or "hda7", assuming you started with a typical Apple-partitioned hard drive.

One of the very first things you'll want to do is bring your system up to date. It's still a YDL 3.0.1 box, but at least it'll be as up to date as they got. Do this with yum update and sit back. Be patient. Wait a while. Answer 'y'es when the time comes.

Adding Freshrpms

Add the Freshrpms site to your updater's configuration. Edit your /etc/yum.conf file and add this text to the bottom.

[freshrpms]
name=Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 - ppc - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/yellowdog/3.0/ppc/freshrpms

Just to get it over with, do something like yum list now. It'll force all the headers to be downloaded from Freshrpms so that it'll know what software is available. You don't have to do that now, of course, but if you do, there will be less waiting later when you actually want to download something!

Fixing Video

The text console mode under YDL 3.0.1 works great when you boot with video=ofonly (or if you just check the No Video Driver box). However, when you're running X, you'll probably notice some strangeness.

The anaconda-generated /etc/XF86Config file will leave some pixels off the side of your screen. If you run Xautoconfig without any arguments, you get a different configuration... one that leaves pixels off the other side of your screen. sigh But, if you run Xautoconfig with the --safe option, you'll get a configuration that looks perfect on your screen. Sure, you don't have any snazzy video acceleration, but we'll worry about that some other day.

Note: We still have no control over screen brightness or contrast yet.

Fixing Sound

YDL 3.0.1 does support sound, but for reasons I can't be bothered with chasing down, neither YDL's anaconda nor the underlying Redhat sound detection stuff works right. There's nothing to trigger the loading of the proper kernel modules for sound. We could do this with some start and stop init scripts, but it turns out the LKM mechanism is fancy enough that we can add sound support with a single line change to the /etc/modules.conf file.

First, get the major device number of /dev/dsp on your system. It's probably 14, but it never hurts to double check (maybe you and I are loading slightly different systems). Then, add a line like the following to /etc/modules.conf, replacing the 14 as appropriate. With this change, the first program to touch /dev/dsp will cause a flurry of kernel modules to be loaded via modprobe, which will support the underlying sound system.

alias char-major-14 dmasound_pmac

Note: The hardware audio mixer still needs to be fixed.

If you have the sox package loaded, you can try it out with something simple like

play -v 0.3 /usr/share/sounds/*Ahem*

At this point, you'll know if your sound is working right.

If you want to play MP3's, you'll need an MP3 decoder added to your system. There's a ton of packages that you could add, that would all trigger support for MP3 to be loaded into your system. I suppose things like xmms would do it. But, just to get the ball rolling, here's something quicker. Just run yum install mpg321 and let it pick up a couple dependencies along the way; install them all.

Then, you can just run mpg321 -g 50 foo.mp3 to listen to an mp3 at a moderately low gain (volume).

Front Panel Buttons

Nothing fixed here, yet. Nor is the remote control working, either. I suspect these devices all live on the I2C bus, so it's probably not going to be very hard to get them going. Again, another day...

TV Tuner

Don't make me laugh.

FM Radio

Again, don't make me laugh.

Problems

Q: My caps lock key is flickering, and/or I get all upper case or mixed case characters when I type, even though I'm not hitting the shift key.

A: Yup. I think this is a side effect from using BootX instead of quik as your boot loader. I've found that, when this happens, if I just hit the caps lock key a bunch of times, the system finally syncs back up with it and it starts working right. The light may stick on, but the key will work as you'd expect.