[LispM] MacIvory Setup

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Raymond,

> I see that Faré has finally got his MacIvory III - congratulations!
Well, thanks.
The event was like a new birth, I invited friends and we had a celebration.
And then I spent some days configuring the machine: the MacOS side was a
nuisance and is now in a state that I don't hope can be improved much;
the Genera side needs a complete reinstallation, for which your indications
are a great guide.

> 	I've been planning to write some notes about my experiences
> with setting up a MacIvory II.
Thanks a lot!

> 	I had a bit of trouble setting up the machine with the new
> disk, partly caused by the fact that my CDROM is not an original Apple
> unit, and so requires a custom (or modified) driver.
What speed is your CDROM? If it is more than 1X,
I might be wrong about my failure diagnostic during installation.
ICAC, the failure is as follows, when executing the Restore Disk FEP command
(SCSI ID 3 being my Apple CD600e, aka MATSHITACD-ROM CR-8006 1.0m):
[2001-02-19 06:35:00 (GMT) :: Restoring disk unit 0 from CART27: ...
 [2001-02-19 06:35:00 (GMT) :: Creating an initial FEP file system on disk unit 0 ... done.:: 2001-02-19 06:45:08 (GMT)]
 Superseding condition=>  disk: Unit 0 at SCSI ID 3, status: 2, sense: 5, additional-sense: 72, sector NIL, reason: NIL
 [Error: Error while opening CART27:: UMAKE-INSTANCE on :closed NIL <<Error printing #<DTP-ARRAY 37000554450>>> with REFERENCE-COUNT = NIL]

> The same goes for the hard disk: it is not one of the Apple-OEM'ed units,
> so I had to get a patched version of HD setup.
I was sent Hard Disk Tools 2.x, which has more features than HD SC Setup,
in case this helps.

> The OS is MacOS 7.5.5, by the way,
> with OpenTransport (a TCP/IP package) 1.1.2 installed on top of it.
I could find an old copy of 7.6, and installed the 7.6.1 upgrade.
It looks like OTP 1.1.2 prevents the MacOS from seeing netatalk shares
at startup, whereas 7.5.5 + MacTCP sees it perfectly.

Side note: I found myself with a wealth of space on my 9G drive, and
attempted to install Linux/mac68k, but it wouldn't recognize either of
my graphics cards. BSD hates the IIfx at all. Too bad for the '030,
with no half-decent OS on it. But the most important processor is the Ivory,
anyway, and IT has a sexy OS.

> 	Initially, I set the HD up with a single partition. This
> caused the Ivory "Breath of Life" application to fail, with similar
> symptoms as Faré describes on <URL:http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html>.
> Faré says that his problem was caused by the speed of the CDROM;
Well, I may be *completely* wrong on this diagnostic.
What error message did you get?

> I suspect that my problems were caused by either the disk volume size or
> file system block size exceeding the MacIvory SW's expectations.
My problem could actually have been the same, as I had a 4GB partition.

> Anyway, the problem disappeared when I repartitioned the disk as 2
> partitions of slightly less than 2 GB each, and a smaller partition of
> about 300MB.
I will have to retry that...

> 	An additional benefit is that the file system block size
> was reduced in the same process, and a small file that occuped 127k on
> the large partition was down to 31k on the small(er) partition. This
> is supposedly not a problem with MacOS 8.1, which has an improved
> file system.
Yes. I now made lots of small partitions.
e.g. the sources on the MCL 3.1 CD occupies over 600MB on the 4GB partition,
but fit very well on a 218 MB on a 250MB partition.
Similarly, I made one 64MB partition for booting system 6.1, one 128MB
for all my macos binaries, and one 32MB for a system 7.5.5 backup/fallback.

> (Actually, when I had a single 4GB partition, the MacIvory
> control panel suggested a FEP partition of about 2GB. I suspect that
> there may be a limit of 2GB for a FEP partition - does anybody know?)
When I forced the size over 2GB in the little box in the control panel,
it a) accepted it b) now printed the size as a negative number.
So I guess the 2GB limit has to do with some unresolved signedness
or unsignedness issue with the 32-bit integers encoding partition size.

> 	At this point I was able to boot Genera. The first thing to be
> done [...]
Thanks a lot for all the tips with Genera. I'll try them all this weekend.

Currently, I'm living on a copy of a preinstalled pair of FEP partitions,
that have been configured for another setup than mine, but that allow me
to walk the Genera documentation.

> I chose to do a "Save World Complete" (after first doing
> "Optimize World").
Optimizing the World, Saving it.
"C'est tout un programme! (It's a whole program!)", as we say in french...

May the LAMBDA be with you,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
When my time on earth is completed, I want to go quietly in my sleep,
like my grandfather ... not screaming in terror, like his passengers.