Glanz, thanks for the suggestions. Do you know what the name of the boot sector file is? I certainly don't.

Another problem has now taken center stage for me. I just fired up the powerbook and chose to run linux. I got all the way to the welcome to gnome after logging in but it isn't loading anything, just sits there. So, I tried a few key combos to get into a shell. Control-Alt-F2 seemed to be the one and I am asked to log in. I'm in my zsh shell from there now. But I can't run fsck while file systems are mounted. So, how to troubleshoot this, that is the question of the moment?

I tried rebooting with the only method I have had which is, sudo shutdown -r now. But I got the same stuck gnome startup screen. The last thing I did before shutting down last night was to add my trackpad command to a panel in gnome that was called startup items, I think. Well, that must be what's causing this problem and why I can't get fully booted up into gnome now, again, I think.

So, how do I edit that out if I can't even get fully started up into gnome? Any ideas?

I believe the startup items are in ~/.gnome/session. You may want to check out ~/.gnome/session-manual also. If your system did not make a ~/.gnome directory, you'll have to check /usr/share/gnome/default.session

The booting info should be in /boot, but that may not be the one we're looking for...... I'll take a look see later

Thanks Glanz. I suppose the name and location of that file should have been obvious. But I don't know all the possible naming conventions for files in Debian yet and so it's guessing on my part without knowing the relative name to begin with.

gnome/session-manual appears to be the file I must have created through the gui in gnome. It's not a manual as I first thought but rather a manually created file with preference settings in it. I'm thinking this is probably okay to delete and another would be created if necessary. But to be safe, I'll back it up locally.

Okay, worked like a charm! I'm back into gnome again. I'm guessing that I had the priority on that file too high. But since it was a command beginning with sudo, I though that would make it high.

The boot sector file is still alluding me however. I haven't found any of those to contain anything close to what you suggested. I've primarily been looking in /boot and /etc so far. But I'll keep at it. I wonder if it could be named something totally different than *boot*?

The delete key madness is solved. That's right. And I didn't have to go out and learn vi or do any of those bindkey or xmodmap kind of things at all. It turns out that with my recently added modifier keys and a way to access terminal preferences, there it was, to swap ^h for delete. Sheeesh! And I had read through a huge dissertation on why it happens that these keys get screwed up and another on diagnosing the problem, but each without a viable cure. Grrrr.

still no effect of the alt key for me. Will try this link

Hi tjj. That's an excellent link on the key mapping subject. There are some other good resources from that site too. I don't know if you've looked into the HOWTO files about it. They're very informative and might have something particular to your language and keyboard. On my rig, they are in /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/.

I've got my zsh working perfectly now. It turned out that the installation of zsh didn't automatically configure the fpath as it did in OS X. Once I corrected that in my ~/.zshenv file, I was in business.

I'm wondering about your sound. Do you have any? I don't. I seem to remember getting some messages somewhere in the boot process about sound not being configured properly. Does that sound familiar to you as well?

I've also been wondering about upgrading Xfree, or if that's even a possible option on our rigs. Our version is 4.1.0 for the woody kernel. Do you know anything about that?

Best,

thatch

thatch,
I haven't had the time yet, unfortunately I have to catch up on a sh.. sorry, truckload of 'regular' work. I have no sound. But I seem to remember during the install, that I skipped that part(?).
At least, I know I wasn't surprised when I read something about sound not being configured. And as the installation of Debian is such a breeze, it *must* be because I left it out intentionally.:D

Does your Alt key work as expected?

BTW, all my failed harddrives have now been replaced, and as I had to by a new waiting for the replacement, I actually have a spare 30 GB drive that will go into the 3400. -Along with 128 Mb ram! How about that for a powerpc!
Before I do that, I would like to have solved the keyboard issue(s), though, as well as getting some sound out of it...

--you probably need to know the size of the shoes of the sound card programmer in order to select the right driver:rolleyes:

tjj, Oh well. All in good time. I've been doing some of this rather piecemeal myself. Every chance I get, I'm playing around with Debian though.

I'm glad you feel that your installation of Debian was such a breeze. Had I the CD-Rom, perhaps mine might have been too. I had to give it up on the 7500 because it wouldn't recognize the ethernet and possibly the video card. And as you know, I had plenty of trouble on the 3400 too. But since I've got it installed, it's been extremely stable; not one kernel panic or crash of any kind.

Yes, my Alt key has worked fine from the beginning. That keymapping stuff is very complicated. I was hoping for you that something relevant would be found in your HOWTO for Danish keyboards.

That's great you have all your hard drive issues solved now. That will be a huge hard drive for the 3400 and plenty of ram to boot. On my 3 Gig drive, I set up about 700 MB for OS 8.6, 300 MB for an exchange partition and the rest for Debian. Then on the Debian drive, I have five partitions not including the swap. They are:

/
/usr
/var
/home
/tmp

It works splendidly with that setup for me.

One other thing comes to mind.... Do you have copy and paste? I don't. And I haven't a clue about how to get that fixed yet.

tjj, I just had a look for you about the Alt key on Danish keyboards and I found it in the /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/Danish-HOWTO.gz. You should have that file on your setup. One of the very first topics is:

Getting the AltGr key to work under X11

You can view this document using zcat like so:

zcat /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/Danish-HOWTO.gz | more

Give that a whirl. I hope it gets you to what you need to do to get that solved.

thatch,
No copy and paste in terminal. But in abiword I do, that is, when I realized that I had to hit ctrl+shift+c for copy, and ctrl+shift+v for paste. The shift key eluded me until I checked the menu: it says ctrl+C

How do you get by with the exchange partition?
Is it just a hfs formatted partition that can be mounted in both mac os and debian?

I went for the swap+AllTheRest for my first venture into unixland. It will probably be a good idea to follow your line and do some more partitioning what with the bigger drive. I'm a little uncomfortable being rather challenged in the hardware knowledge section as well as being unix illiterate. If anything, I have come to appreciate the ease of the Mac OS experience, be it due to familiarity or apple smartness. :) Still, it is an educating experience, and I'm sure this old machine will come to new usage and glory in due time.

Edit: Thanks, I just saw post about the Alt key. I'll check it out.
Hmm, no /usr/share/doc here. Must have left it out.

tjj, copy and paste still doesn't work for me in terminal or a text editor program. Yes, my menus always say, control+c and control+v. But adding the shift key didn't change anything on my rig.

The exchange partition idea came from the installation manual. But it doesn't tell anything about how to use it. It is an HFS partition and I believe I will be able to mount it in Debian and hopefully exchange some files that way. Glanz had said that I would need to edit my fstab to have that partition mount at startup. But I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Yes, with your new large hard drive, you'll definitely want to partition it up. Follow the manual for partitions and you'll see all the possible choices including sizes and needs.

thatch
The HOWTO file was where it should be, sorry. It's not very simple, but it appears to be on target, thank you. Right now, I'm actually more comfortable switching to us kbdlayout. I will have to print out the howto file (i.e. if I can print at all:D) to attack the dk-kbd issues, I think. Problem is that the PB kbd is not one of the standard kbds. Should think someone might have made a map for powerbook kbds.
It's getting rather late here, so it will have to wait...

tjj, printing is a whole other issue I haven't even begun to investigate yet. But I did just spend some time on the sound issue, or lack thereof, and came up with the solution.

First, do a 'cat /dev/sndstat' as root. If it returns 'No such device', then do as root also, '/dev/MAKEDEV audio', followed by a 'modprobe dmasound'. Check again the cat command from above and you should now have some output more than before. It should start with: 'PowerMac (AWACS rev 2) DMA sound driver:'.

Then use your favorite text editor to add this line to your /etc/modutils/aliases file: 'alias char-major-14 dmasound'

That's it. I heard the pop of the speaker right away. And a press on the down arrow in terminal gives me a beep sound. Success! I hope it works for you too.

I just found out that the sound was gone after a restart. But to get it back, all I had to do was 'modprobe dmasound'. Next I will try to add that to startup in the gnome settings:session:session properties & startup programs. I hope it works.

Along the same lines with startup items, I still have to do the notap dance for my trackpad as soon as I start up or restart. I've made a function of it in zsh so I don't have to type the whole command, 'sudo /sbin/trackpad notap', every time. So, instead I can just type notap and enter my password. I suppose you could do the same with tcsh by creating an alias or an executable.

Well, the startup programs in gnome didn't work just like it wouldn't for notap. So, I created another function in zsh called soundstart which works. You can do this in tcsh with either an alias or an executable file in your path, the latter not being tcsh dependent.

Following up on my previous post, last night I found that what tjj had eluded to about compiling certain modules into the kernel during installation was exactly what should have been done for sound with the powerbook 3400 and Debian. But we didn't know at the time and assumed that the installer was sensing our components.

So, rather than following my instructions for getting sound going in the previous post, it would be better to not do it that way but rather add that module, called dmasound, to the kernel. This can be done while booted up by selecting 'modconf' run as root or sudo. That will take you to the familiar screen to select extra modules that you saw when originally installing.

Other than the fact that was probably the intended way to do sound, I have had some curios message come up from doing the method I described in the previous post and then doing the modconf method thereafter. The message is:But either of those described solutions don't work and return the same error message. And that makes me wonder if I had not done the method in the previous post first but rather the seemingly more correct method, if that might have had the desired result without the error message. My sound is started up without any function or script now but I get that error message which I dismiss and never see any problem from.