[Oberon] Re: IBM 300 GL

[Paul Reed]

Aubrey,

I can't tell you if Bluebottle will run on an IBM 300 GL (maybe
even the ETH people can't), because in my experience unless it's
been tested for real, the hardware spec alone is not a guarantee.
You can never rule out the possibility that something's been
"tweaked" somewhere by the manufacturer, particularly with the
big names (Compaq are the worst) so that a generic chip driver
won't work properly.

However, I did notice that somebody's got OpenBSD working on it, 
which is a good sign.  The startup messages (dmesg), which give a 
good idea of the internal hardware, have been posted here:

http://open.bsdcow.net/config/machines/ibm-300gl

but I would take that with a pinch of salt - the graphics card
seems to be different, and it doesn't even have an IBM hard drive! :)

OpenBSD is the only mainstream OS which still boots off a floppy, 
and I always carry around (or make) a disk from the install image
(e.g. floppy32.fs) available from www.openbsd.org.

Before I invite a flamefest, I am only suggesting using OpenBSD as 
diagnostics, not as an alternative to Bluebottle! :)

You probably want a DOS boot disk as well, with a program which will
tell you about the VESA video modes (Pieter has one, but I couldn't
find it quickly on the site - Pieter, are you out there? :]) because
as I said in a previous post, it's not sufficient to have a VESA 2.0
card - the relevant graphics mode must be supported in linear, not
banked mode, and I don't think the driver checks this very well...

Paul Reed