Hi, I had the chance to spend a few hours installing plain 7.3 on a Motorola PowerStack Series E with 64MB RAM and a 604 CPU. Not a whole lot of time, but I noticed a few things up to now that may be of interest as I couldn't find comments anywhere on these topics. - While I could boot the first CD, the machine froze after the message "Uncompressing" when trying to set up the RAMDISK. Couldn't find a way to get around this. Is the PReP CD boot kernel known to be broken? - I used some very old (6.4?) install disks I still had somewhere to boot a kernel far enough to get to the 7.3 CDs. Didn't have much success putting the kernel image available with 7.3 onto floppy disks. They are apparently larger than 1.44MB. Oh well. - The PowerStack in question was AIX formatted. The install process will not allow partitioning and will not(!) issue an error message. I used a separate virtual console to manually pre-partition the disk to a DOS empty state to be able to install the system. Took me a while to figure that out. - Debian documents a "bootargs" PPCBUG variable which apparently the SuSE kernel doesn't support. I hacked the kernel content for the root partition name. Would be nice though if it supported bootargs. - /usr/X11R6/bin/sax doesn't exist. Well, sax.sh does, but that's not what sax2 tells me. Anyway, XF86 V3/4 apparently isn't set up to support the Cirrus chipset as both sax and sax2 freeze the machine with a black screen eventually. Interesting enough, X itself starts up in 640*480with FBDev on top of CLgen,cfb8 but sax/sax2 won't ever. X freezes up the machine *very* easily on just a few mouse clicks. I guess for now I have to avoid X. - "halt" doesn't. The machine will reboot and doesn't stop. Actually, no PPC kernel ever halted on the PowerStacks that I tried. Wonder why. Ok, maybe some of this helps others, maybe you also have some input that could help me. Heinz Wrobel
On Wed, Feb 27, Wrobel Heinz-r39252 wrote:
Hi,
I had the chance to spend a few hours installing plain 7.3 on a Motorola PowerStack Series E with 64MB RAM and a 604 CPU. Not a whole lot of time, but I noticed a few things up to now that may be of interest as I couldn't find comments anywhere on these topics.
- While I could boot the first CD, the machine froze after the message "Uncompressing" when trying to set up the RAMDISK. Couldn't find a way to get around this. Is the PReP CD boot kernel known to be broken?
This was due to a last minute change to allow booting on a 43p 140, it broke PReP MTX and similar... You might be able to boot with "noinitrd" into the installed system.
- I used some very old (6.4?) install disks I still had somewhere to boot a kernel far enough to get to the 7.3 CDs. Didn't have much success putting the kernel image available with 7.3 onto floppy disks. They are apparently larger than 1.44MB. Oh well.
The files on the ftp server will fit on the floppy: ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/kernel/2.4.12/
- The PowerStack in question was AIX formatted. The install process will not allow partitioning and will not(!) issue an error message. I used a separate virtual console to manually pre-partition the disk to a DOS empty state to be able to install the system. Took me a while to figure that out.
This bug in fdisk was fixed later. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=42 will also help.
- Debian documents a "bootargs" PPCBUG variable which apparently the SuSE kernel doesn't support. I hacked the kernel content for the root partition name. Would be nice though if it supported bootargs.
This is a generic bug, I dont know if it is supported at all. At least my MTX+ allows me to set that, but the bootloader doesnt know about it.
- /usr/X11R6/bin/sax doesn't exist. Well, sax.sh does, but that's not what sax2 tells me. Anyway, XF86 V3/4 apparently isn't set up to support the Cirrus chipset as both sax and sax2 freeze the machine with a black screen eventually. Interesting enough, X itself starts up in 640*480with FBDev on top of CLgen,cfb8 but sax/sax2 won't ever. X freezes up the machine *very* easily on just a few mouse clicks. I guess for now I have to avoid X.
Do you have a CL5446? Mine can not do more than 1024x768 or I will get garbage after a while. You need to generate your own modeline, or use fbset: fbset -a 1024x768-75 -depth 8 sax2 -a
- "halt" doesn't. The machine will reboot and doesn't stop. Actually, no PPC kernel ever halted on the PowerStacks that I tried. Wonder why.
Known bug, no idea how to tweak the registers... Gruss Olaf -- $ man clone BUGS Main feature not yet implemented...
participants (2)
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Olaf Hering -
Wrobel Heinz-r39252