On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 10:33:11AM +0800, Rob Kramer wrote: > > Hi all, > > I bought a new toy at an auction for about US$40; a F50 dual 604e CHRP box. > But now I'm having no end of difficulties installing linux on it.. very tricky. > I've read many documents on how to use yaboot on rs6k, how to install Debian, > etc., but my installation process is stuck at the very start. I tried > OpenFirmware CD booting, floppy booting, net booting -- and I'm getting > nowhere. I've upgraded the microcode/firmware to the latest versions. CD booting is unlikly to work, most CDs are made to boot on macs, not IBMs. > - CD boot: I've never been able to boot *any* file from CD. The SCSI CDROM > device is tested OK on another machine. not surprising. > - Floppy boot: For some reason, the boot file spec has to be all caps. I guess > this is due to the FAT32 filesystem or something, but I can't find an probably. > explanation anywhere on the net. So 'boot floppy:,\install\yaboot' doesn't do > a thing, but 'boot floppy:,\INSTALL\YABOOT' does. > > For the latter boot attempt, yaboot actually starts, but then complains about > a missing config file: > > [drive]:-1,/etc/yaboot.conf: Unknown or corrupt filesystem > > The '-1' partition is normal, apparently. Perhaps the > lowercase /etc/yaboot.conf is the problem? Is FAT32 even the right fs for > floppy boot? yaboot just doesn't work very well on these machines in general, this goes back to the yaboot code being a horrible tangled, unfixable mess with far too many Apple OF biases. it should mostly work once you have a disk based setup going, but cdrom, network, and floppy booting just are not going to work very well on this hardware (not necessarily impossible, but nowhere near Just Works). > - Net boot: I'm not sure yaboot even supports this. Some docs seem to indicate > it does, some don't. My guess is it doesn't support fetching a yaboot.conf > etc. from the server. it supports it fairly well on macs, ive heard of people who have managed to coax it into working on some IBM models, but again, not well and not easily. > If I don't use yaboot to just net-boot a (b?)zImage, how could I pass kernel > boot parameters and an initrd file? I don't see how you can do for example a > Debian install from bootp really.. for initial install I recommend not attempting to use yaboot, wait till you have your system installed and then you can install yaboot on a 0x41 prep boot partition, where it can boot from your root filesystem. Unfortunatly I don't know much beyond this for IBM machines, I believe what you need to do is build a zImage.initrd which is just a zImage kernel with a initrd built into it. that should let you boot a installer. past that make sure you create a small 0x41 prep boot partition where yaboot will be installed (ybin should still work, but yaboot is pretty much just dd'ed to this partition after having run the addnote utility on it, ybin normally detects IBM hardware and does all this automatically). you also need to make sure your root partition is a primary partition, NOT extended, yaboot can only see primary partitions (secondary filesystems such as /usr, /var, /home etc may be on extended partitions). sorry that I cannot help much beyond that, I have no direct experience, nor access to this type of hardware. someone once attempted to donate one to me, but after receiving and fiddling with it I discovered its a prep, not a chrp, thus no OpenFirmware, and no compatibilty with things like yaboot. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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