Subject: [alpine-devel] Difficulties with a Mac mini

From: Dubiousjim <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2012 19:31:35 -0500

I have a Mac mini I was successfully running Alpine 2.4.5-ish on. I had
installed Alpine there sometime around 2.3 and upgraded until now. Today
I changed the repos to 2.5 and did an `apk upgrade -U -a`, cleaned up
the .apk-new files, checked the /boot files and so on, and rebooted to
load the new kernel.

No joy. I get a kernel panic and can only see the end of a trace
reporting stuff about ata. I'm not sure how to see the whole output.

Anyway, I then attempted to boot from an external medium to downgrade
the system back to the 2.4 repos until we get a new kernel. Apple's
hardware is of course completely open and flexible...Not. This machine
won't boot via USB, but only via a CD. So I burned a 2.5 CD and tried to
boot from that, in case the problem was, say, with my initrd. No, same
kernel panic.

I had an older CD from 2.3 something, but this machine is
too finicky and refuses to even attempt to boot from that. Maybe the
burn wasn't good, or the disk has gotten damaged.

So I downloaded and burned a 2.4.6 ISO. Checked the sha1, burned it
slowly, and verified the write. Everything checks ok. Attempt to boot
the mini from this CD. No BIOS interface on Apple machines; instead you
have to hold certain keys at startup. And I know which keys to hold but
for some damn reason it takes about 30 minutes of power-cycling and
key-holding to get the machine to recognize that there's a CD in the
drive that it should try to boot from. Ok, then we're up and running.

Booting from the CD... oh wait, it says the openrc APK file is bad and
the startup fails.

Strange. Let's try getting a 2.4.5 ISO. Again, checked the ISO, burned
it slowly, and verified the write. Everything ok. Attempt to boot the
mini from this CD.

Booting from the CD... oh darn, the openrc APK file is bad and the
startup fails. (Yes, I did double-check that this was a 2.4.5 cd and the
other was a 2.4.6.) Weird.

Let's try getting a 2.4.4 ISO. Go through the whole process again. This
time we boot up fine.

So half of this email is just voicing frustration at how difficult Apple
hardware is to use with Linux. (It's even worse with FreeBSD.)
The other half, which might have a real claim on your attention, is that
I had troubles booting this hardware from the 2.5 release kernel. And
also had strange issues making it impossible to boot from the 2.4.5 and
2.4.6 ISOs. (These were x86.)

It's possible the problems are just with my hardware---maybe the CD
drive is failing, for instance. But I thought I'd just chime up in case
any of this rings a bell with anyone else. Or might be useful in any
other way.

-- 
Dubiousjim
[email-masked]

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