Mac OS 9 booting on: Mac mini G4 (Detailed Posts)

[IIO]

maybe there is another software which you can replace sleeper with which supports that?

[adespoton]

maybe there is another software which you can replace sleeper with which supports that?

Hmm... I'll have to plumb the depths of my memory and see if I can remember an Energy Saver replacement with WoL support.  It may come down to having to write it myself.  That may take a few years.

[IIO]

the init which would do this should have the following functionality:

 - do nothing for 5 minutes
 - detect incoming network traffic
 - move mouse for 1 pixel
 - repeat

any takers?

once we get hibernation working, detecting network traffic will become a bit more difficult, hahaha.

[adespoton]

the init which would do this should have the following functionality:

 - do nothing for 5 minutes
 - detect incoming network traffic
 - move mouse for 1 pixel
 - repeat

any takers?

once we get hibernation working, detecting network traffic will become a bit more difficult, hahaha.

Actually, you'd have to do it like this:

- do nothing for 5 minutes
- wake
- check network buffer for magic packet
- If not present, sleep

But that's only to support all hardware capable of sleep.  For the G4 Mini and other hardware from the same era, this is all handled in hardware; the Ethernet port stays active during sleep, and if the magic packet is received, the interface sends the wake command.  This is a feature that can be toggled on and off via software; Energy Saver does it, Sleeper does not (but instead passes the task off to Energy Saver to handle).  Since Energy Saver is not aware of the more modern PMU in the G4 Mini, this function doesn't work, as there's no way to set the correct flag.

So the better fix is just to figure out how to programatically set the flag on the PMU and let hardware handle the rest.

The other alternative would be to put a hardware monitor in-line between the Ethernet cable and the port, that polls the line for the magic packet going to the right MAC ID, and then sends a mouse click event to a USB port if this is detected.  Seems like something an Arduino Nano Ethernet could pull off, or if you've got the device physically near another always-on device, you could just bridge the two with a USB or Firewire cable, and have the other device monitor for the MAC and packet in promiscuous mode, and send a pulse down the line when it's seen.

The more I think about it, this is probably more along the route I'll go; I've got a server sitting beside the boxes I want to wake, so I can just set up a cable that sends a signal, and remote into the server to trigger the wakeup.

That's if we can't get PMU handling working right

[IIO]

maybe that what wakes the apple control panel is an apple event?

[adespoton]

To complicate things even further, back as far as System 7.1, some hardware was able to BOOT if data came in on the serial port (eg, modem ring).  By 1998, I believe all hardware had Ethernet (and the modem for those that had it) linked to the PMU, but the "boot on ring" feature was gone, replaced with "wake on ring".

Say... my Minis have a modem port, and do support wake on ring!  Maybe I'll just hook THAT up to a USB cable that can spike the line level....

[IIO]

so, no reports yet about booting the developer trasition kit mac mini into OS9?

now i am disappointed.

jk.

[P.O.]

Don't know if I'm posting at the right place, but I'll try my luck...
I have begun to do sound and music work again, and I'm trying to assemble a working setup using a Mac Mini 1.42 and DIGI 002, OSX and OS9.
My old setup is an OS9 DA with DIGI 001. It works, but I have come to appreciate the relative silence of working with Powerbooks. Hence the project to rebuild my studio setup around a Mini.
I have downloaded and installed the Mini-OS9 disk image v.9. It works pretty well, but there are some quirks I'd like to investigate:

Video: I have a 1920x1080 monitor. When plugged in DVI, I get full resolution from startup to the end of the extensions parade, just to where the desktop normally appears. After that the screen goes black. If I adapt to VGA, all is fine. But I'd really like if it worked from DVI, as I usually use a DVI KVM in my setup. I have this feeling there's not much missing if it starts at the right resolution... any clues?

Time: Strangely enough, there's always a four-hour offset in the clock displayed time between OS9 and OSX. If I adjust one to be right, the other one will be wrong! What Gives?

This said, hey, thanks for the wonderful work done!!   This is pretty awesome.

[darthnVader]

Don't know if I'm posting at the right place, but I'll try my luck...
I have begun to do sound and music work again, and I'm trying to assemble a working setup using a Mac Mini 1.42 and DIGI 002, OSX and OS9.
My old setup is an OS9 DA with DIGI 001. It works, but I have come to appreciate the relative silence of working with Powerbooks. Hence the project to rebuild my studio setup around a Mini.
I have downloaded and installed the Mini-OS9 disk image v.9. It works pretty well, but there are some quirks I'd like to investigate:

Video: I have a 1920x1080 monitor. When plugged in DVI, I get full resolution from startup to the end of the extensions parade, just to where the desktop normally appears. After that the screen goes black. If I adapt to VGA, all is fine. But I'd really like if it worked from DVI, as I usually use a DVI KVM in my setup. I have this feeling there's not much missing if it starts at the right resolution... any clues?

Time: Strangely enough, there's always a four-hour offset in the clock displayed time between OS9 and OSX. If I adjust one to be right, the other one will be wrong! What Gives?

This said, hey, thanks for the wonderful work done!!   This is pretty awesome.

Trash the display preference file.

[P.O.]

No Joy. I trashed display preference from OSX. Restarted in OS9, went well and the desktop appeared after a brief blackout at the end of extensions parade, but my mouse pointer froze (although click worked), couldn't do anything, had to force quit.
Subsequents OS9 starts led me where I was before: permanent blackout instead of desktop. Display preference file gone for good...

[IIO]

Time: Strangely enough, there's always a four-hour offset in the clock displayed time between OS9 and OSX. If I adjust one to be right, the other one will be wrong! What Gives?

i had this for years until i reactivated the network time extension in OS9 again in around 2007.

i think this happens when you dont have the correct time zone set in either system but then remove the timezone control panel.

[P.O.]

I find this strange as the time zone is set as the same place on both systems. I guess activating network time would be an easy fix, but this mini is not on any network, and I do not want it to connect to the internet.

[IIO]

mb it is conincidence but it was 4 hours for me, too.

[P.O.]

No, I think it is a planned conspiration.

[darthnVader]

No Joy. I trashed display preference from OSX. Restarted in OS9, went well and the desktop appeared after a brief blackout at the end of extensions parade, but my mouse pointer froze (although click worked), couldn't do anything, had to force quit.
Subsequents OS9 starts led me where I was before: permanent blackout instead of desktop. Display preference file gone for good...

Hmmmm..................

I thought the @Elliot fixed the mouse freeze issue and that was included in the V9 CD?

Also, you have the latest Radeon drivers for OS 9?

[P.O.]

Well it seems to be OK now: I got it to work with the mini directly connected to the monitor with DVI when I trashed the Monitor preference folder in OS9.
When I go through the DVI KVM things don't play well and get unreliable.
I reverted to a VGA DVI, it's working well except that my DA won't go to 1920x1080 when connected in VGA.
What are these "latest Radeon drivers"? Am I supposed to pick and place them by hand?  I got "ATI Radeon 3D accelerator".

As for the time offset, I guess someone is trying to tell us OS9 is ahead of its time...

[darthnVader]

Well it seems to be OK now: I got it to work with the mini directly connected to the monitor with DVI when I trashed the Monitor preference folder in OS9.
When I go through the DVI KVM things don't play well and get unreliable.
I reverted to a VGA DVI, it's working well except that my DA won't go to 1920x1080 when connected in VGA.
What are these "latest Radeon drivers"? Am I supposed to pick and place them by hand?  I got "ATI Radeon 3D accelerator".

As for the time offset, I guess someone is trying to tell us OS9 is ahead of its time...

I thought these maybe included in the v9 CD?

https://gona.mactar.hu/ATI_Mac/ATI_Radeon_Retail_Installer/ati-retail-9-2-2-jan2005.hqx

I'd say your KVM does something the Mac OS doesn't like over DVI, not much that can be done about that.

[P.O.]

I thought these maybe included in the v9 CD?

https://gona.mactar.hu/ATI_Mac/ATI_Radeon_Retail_Installer/ati-retail-9-2-2-jan2005.hqx

Maybe the bits are there, but there certainly is no such installer on my disk...

[DieHard]

Anyway, weird stuff. Now time to see if drives bigger than 2 TB can also work. Apple docs state OS 9 (but not 8 ) has a 2 TB size limit per partition (called "volume" in Apple parlance), but no mention about drive size limits... But somehow, I always assumed 2 TB would also be the drive limit. But I want to challenge that. At least I have personally used network volumes up to 4TB via AFP successfully under 9.2.2 without any problems, for many months so far. Impressively, this already goes beyond what Apple stated was the limit for OS 9 "volumes", but maybe AFP volumes are dealt with differently. (And, who knows, maybe some crazy bugs are just silently waiting for me to cross the 2 TB line, like evil gremlins.)

There's always so much fun to be had.

OK, So of course it's time to further muddy up the G4 Mini Topic, I just wanted to throw out some pennies (2 cents)

1)  For newbies, the large drive obsession where some of our senior members are pushing the limits of OS 9, is a great 'theoretical" discussion; and a "cool experiment" but it's best to stick to Volumes of 200GB or less in the real world of an OS9 Audio / Video G4 that has a mechanical drive; as discussed many times here, many de fragmenting apps will run out of RAM (in OS 9) if you go bigger.  Of course you can boot to OSX (or a modified OS X CD) and run a drefrag, but this adds levels of complexity for the average users.  In a real world studio environment, de fragmenting a G4 DAW when using mechanical drives is kinda critical over time.

Also the ability to run file system checks and repairs also will also be effected when playing with volume sizes that were not even conceived of in 1999.  As far as SSD drives, no need to defragment, but the ability to run file system checks and repairs also will also be effected in OS 9 on larger than 200GB since many utilities run out of RAM when inspecting these mega volumes if they are close to full.

2)  The max number of files or files/folders under a single folder is a hard limit of 32K, the overall HFS Plus (Mac OS Extended) volume can do a lot more, but the single folder limit starts to come into play when you are using MegaVolumes... for example, if your neat freak, and you create a Volume called "Media" and then make folder called "Audio Samples" ; if you load that up with all the stuff you bought and torrented you can easily hit the max of 32,767 files or files/folders under that folder. So again, the smaller volume sizes (when it comes to an OS9 only G4) make sense. 

3) some apps will create harded limits, like Avid Media Composer

However, with respect to the Disk Cache setting we use for Avid Systems (96k) this seriously limits the amount of files to a folder to about 1200

https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/troubleshooting/en250749
So it's always good to research your main apps to make sure you plan your Volumes and Folders wisely

4) Lastly, as a side note, remember the relationship of block size when storing files on legacy systems. The best choice for Large volumes / drives under OS9 is HFS Plus because of Volume Sizes and max entries; but they actually made a big mistake IMO. Under HFS Plus, they actually LOWERED the default block size from HFS 16KB to HFS Plus 4KB, since they were concerned about tiny files eating up disk space (ex. 1 KB file under HFS ate 16KB of space). This was, IMO, a dumb move, disk space is cheap and Media files are huge, how many people write a ton of 1 KB text notes anyway ?  A file size that looks benign in today's world, say 345,098 Bytes needs a hell of a lot of 4kb blocks and thus a shitload directory entries to store the file. Thus increasing file system overhead and fragmentation unnecessarily. On a G4 DAW a good block size would be 32KB.

[IIO]

Anyway, weird stuff. Now time to see if drives bigger than 2 TB can also work.

there are 3000 members in the facebook group, but noone seems to be able to hook iup a spare 10 TB drive to his mac. would be great if some of us could one day actually test that: connect it, format it with silverlining with 8-times the normal sector size, copy at least 2,5 TB data on it, read these files again, and and and ... it is quite some work.

yes, and then t here are media composer, protools, disk repair utils ...  those need a practice test, too.

afp? well that is not exactly the same as using a drive under OS9, but you know that.

1)  For newbies, the large drive obsession where some of our senior members are pushing the limits of OS 9, is a great 'theoretical" discussion; and a "cool experiment" but it's best to stick to Volumes of 200GB or less in the real world of an OS9 Audio / Video G4 that has a mechanical drive

i guess you are right that the boot drive or the "audio" drive should not be something in an experimental status with yet to discover boundaries or problems.

however, if you are a collector or if you work with data mining, you might need more than a total of 2*120 Gb in your house.

the use of a 20 TB HD which is also redable under MacOS9 has reasoning:

 - it might be easier to maintain or

 - it might be even cheaper to buy 2*20 TB compared to 20*2 TB.

for example for 2*20 TB you would need 2 8-port firewire hubs, and that is not really funny to work like that, and it is not really fun to buy those new for 180 euros because you just dont find them second hand.

however, if you really need 40 TB of storage, you are good advised not to do that with 400 100gb drives if you know what i mean. and i am not only talking about the women acceptance factor here.

if you load that up with all the stuff you bought and torrented you can easily hit the max of 32,767 files or files/folders under that folder. So again, the smaller volume sizes

that is an important advise, too. i have had smaller and bigger issues several times with b-tree errors on disks after unstuffing thousands of files or similar tasks. and that is with 1.5 gig RAM and no other apps open.

and btw. it only happens in OS9, not 10.4.

general rule in 110 land for is to try not to have more than 2000 files in one folder and not to process more than 500-1000 at the same time / in a single task.

storage of textfiles and images in larger amounts happens using toast image file here.

i recently had a broken volume on a 1,5 Tb disk. it was one of 3 of 500 mb each. we all know what would have happened if there would have only 1 partition.

always work with compromises when organizing modular structures, graphs and trees.