I'm wanting to switch from the comodity/x86 arch to the RS/6000 to get reliability-by-design instead of reliability-by-cheap-replacment-parts-when-frequently-break. With the newer POWER arch pSeries out, the older RS/6000s are in the same price ballpark as a current Pentium 4. In my case I can get the H50 with dual 604e 332 for less than the price of a Pentium 4 (e.g. $750 CDN for the H50). My vendor wants to ensure that the unit boots linux before he ships it. I've been using Debian on a 486 but he can't get Debian-PPC to boot, neither LFS, nor Gentoo. SUSE is the latest trial and is the only distribution that says it runs on all RS/6000. The problem I've been getting with other distros is that OF doesn't recognze the CD as bootable and when manually boot yaboot, get CLAIMED FAILED when try to boot the kernel. I'll dl and burn and mail the CD1. Are there any hitches I should tell my vendor about before I send him the CD? Are there any firmware setup tricks to get it to work? There is no current OS on the unit to boot from. It has a blank 9.1 GB SCSI drive in bay B2, along with CDrom and floppy, 256 MB ram. Opinions on using an RS/6000 vs Pentium 4 for general desktop stuff is also appreciated. Other PPC mailing lists are quite MAC specific. Thanks, Doug Tutty.
On Thu, Aug 24, dtutty@porchlight.ca wrote:
I'll dl and burn and mail the CD1. Are there any hitches I should tell my vendor about before I send him the CD? Are there any firmware setup tricks to get it to work? There is no current OS on the unit to boot from. It has a blank 9.1 GB SCSI drive in bay B2, along with CDrom and floppy, 256 MB ram.
You should grab the small boot.iso and see how it goes. http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-stable/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.... Try also to boot directly from the firmware prompt: boot cdrom:1,\suseboot\inst32 If this works, the rest of the install will likely work without trouble.
participants (2)
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dtutty@porchlight.ca
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Olaf Hering