Re: Installation report and plans for oldworld power macintoshes
On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 03:56:01PM +0100, Bastian Blank wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 07:13:41PM +0100, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote:
> > Another possible solution which would be less intrusive to core
> > components like anna would be to handle this via the isinstallable
> > scripts in the quik-installer package. yaboot-installer currently does
> > this to make sure it's only used on newworld powermac.
Gaudenz, i have to shatter your illusions here, yaboot-installer does
nothing such.
Now that the new -5 powerpc kernels have been used in linux-kernel-di, i
decided to give the installation a try on my pegasos box, and here is
what happened :
I easily built the initrd enabled kernel using the netboot initrd (the
cdrom one is too big). I booted it with the devfs=mount option, and it
worked well.
First problem appeared as i got to choose the keyboard. Only USB-pmac
keyboard were available, while i need ps2 keyboards. This resulted in me
choosing the USB-pmac french keyboard, which worked some, but either Alt
or the function keys were not mapped, so i couldn't switch to the second
console. Which gives :
Problem 1 : keyboard selection
=========
=> Easy solution. Propose both ps2 and USB-pmac (and maybe amiga for
apus) keyboard as choice for powerpc. I think the oldworld adb keyboards
get emulated as USB-pmac ones, so this should be no problem. Someone
with oldworld hardware would have to confirm though.
Then everything went well, there was some issue with my sym53c8xx scsi
card not being detected, so i could not test the partitioning scheme on
my scsi removable disk, but i guess that this should be ok, since i can
use parted.
Problem 2 : partitioning
=========
=> I don't know if parted is used on all powerpc subarches, but i
guess it could at least be possible. I called parted by hand from a
shell (and thus discovered that Alt+F2 did not work) and it worked
well. That said, maybe there is some message or something which should
tell the user what kind of partition table should be chosen, depending
on subarches.
So, i chose a partition of my main disk, taking the risk of again losing
everything, and proceeded with the install. This went well, upto the
point where yaboot-installer was to be run, and naturally complained
about no apple bootstrap partition or something.
Problem 3 : bootloader
=========
=> Here the bootloaders, quik for oldpmac, yaboot for newpmac, nothing
for the other subarches, need to check for the subarch. This can be
done by either the isinstallable script, or the libd-i arch detection
code. I guess that the best would be the creation of smallish udebs
for the other subarches without bootloader, which could simply tell
the user that there is no bootloader for its subarch and the steps
needed to boot the final kernel. This could include information on
where the kernel has been installed and such.
Ok, this is mostly what needs to be done to enable support for chrp,
prep, chrp-rs6k and chrp-pegasos powerpc subarches. Not really all that
much.
I rebooted the box by chosing "finish and reboot", altough the french
translation let me a bit dubious about if it was the right thing to do,
but i will tell that the french translation team once it is done, and
then proceeded to reboot into the partition by hand.
And there i faced the last problem, well most probably a bug or
something, i was simply presented with a login prompt, and i had not the
root password to enter it. Normally at this time, it should have booted
in the post-d-i install process, and proceeded smoothly with the
install. Why this happened has me trully baffled, but i couldn't do
much, for lack of root password.
> > As these little udebs are really small it does not really matter much if
> > the get installed by anna or not.
No, as long as they don't get used when they should not.
> Sven Luther and myself decided to enable the subarchitecture matching in
> anna and libdi. The yaboot-installer changes should propagate into
> unstable tomorrow, the other changes may need some days.
Cool.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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