Monday, July 19, 2004

OD 7.2.1 and an emulated environment Since the release of OpenDarwin 7.2.1 hit the news on slashdot, there's been an increase in interest trying to get this thing running. It looks like we have a few people trying to run it under VirtualPC or vmware. Just a few notes about that... VMWare doesn't properly emulate a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. OpenDarwin needs that, so it will likely kernel panic during boot. Getting the folks behind VMWare to fix their video card emulation is one way to resolve this. The second way is for somebody to dig into the OD framebuffer code and remove this restriction. Second, the tulip driver shipping with OD 7.2.1 doesn't yet work with all DEC chipsets. I'm awaiting some data verification from some people running in this configuration, but I believe vmware (and VirtualPC) both emulate a DEC 21040A chipset. That's next on my list for support since I want to get the original "Kanga" PowerBook G3 working under OpenDarwin and it also needs that chipset support. If you are available to beta test this under vmware, VirtualPC or on a Kanga PowerBook, send me an email. 6:52:07 AM    comment []