Re: installing on RiscPC
On Thu 30 Aug, Peter Naulls wrote:
> In message <[🔎] E15bqrG-0000Ug-00@kings-cross.london.uk.eu.org>
> Philip Blundell <philb@gnu.org> wrote:
> > I get the feeling this is still a bit of a black art. Looking at the
> > boot-floppies documentation, it's no surprise: there seems to be no
> > RiscPC specific information at all.
> > Would anybody who's been through this process care to work on adding
> > suitable stuff to the manual? I suspect the amount of information
> > required is actually quite small.
> It's actually quite extensive. My install document covers a good deal of
> the issues, but there's still big areas missing. Perhaps this ought to be
> added somewhere official, and updated (parts are now out of date). I'm not
> volunteering right, btw :-)
I've been trying to catch up on the current state of the Risc-PC install
status for both potato and woody, then documenting it, but largely failing
due to random more-urgent things, for a couple of months now.
I have a host of bits of code and fixes to be added both from my previous
efforts and some from others (including stuff from Chris's machines), but it
needs incorporating and testing. I'll get round to it eventually I hope.
Eventually this will get t the top of my list - in the meantime if anyone
else gets enthused don't let me stop you :-)
> > We probably ought to bundle some kind of boot loader on the Debian CD
> > images too; what's the loader of choice these days? (LinLoader would be
> > my guess, but what do I know?)
> Yes linloader, it just hasn't been done.
I had very little success with linloader when I used it about 9 months ago. I
don't appear to have recorded the details but essentialy it wouldn't work at
all on riscos4, or 3.5. It sometimes worked on 3.6 and 3.7 (IIRC). Using some
of the 'memfix' utils from !PC which fix riscos memory-map table bugs
sometimes helped but not completely. Overall I didn't find it sufficiently
reliable to be much use. Has it been worked on some more since then? Or was I
doing something wrong.
I suspected that it was failing to arrange a properly contiguous area of
riscos memory (a difficult task as there are a host of RISCOS bugs to trip
you up). I suppose I ought to try and fix it but I just stuck to using !Linux
as it basically worked. Given that rmk has mostly lost interest in the RiscPC
these days he may well now be happy to fully free this code so we can just
use that?
Wookey
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