Power3/44P 270 Debian Install
Hi All,
Welp... I've had YDL 1.2 on this 44P 270 **FOREVER**. Trivia for the
day, this machine was the second power3 box to run linux. Time to move
forward so I thought I'd throw debian on and see how the 3.0 installer
behaved.
Really only one snafu thus far and only one snafu on the horizon.
In my case since i started with a "working" system with yaboot on it,
it was fairly easy, I just took a working 32 bit power3 linux kernel and
used that but with the following yaboot.conf entry:
image=/boot/vmlinux-32-2.4.18
label=debian-install
initrd=/root.bin
initrd-size=8192
append="root=/dev/sda2 console=tty0 video=matrox:memtype:4"
The matrox part is since i have a g200 in the system, need to tap it on
the shoulder so it uses all 8 meg on the card.
So this successfully brought up kernel and into the installer. Tho the
first screen I saw was a dull gray background with a cursor in the upper
right. I hit the tab key a couple of times which seemed to "wake" it up
and then put me in into the chooser for languages. Then from there...
standard stuff.
I did skip the kernel/module install step since afterall I need a custom
kernel.
And this is where the second snafu comes into play. I needed to make
myself a boot kernel on floppy before hand. OOoops!
O well, easy enough to do, so when we boot the first time to install the
rest of the packages, that part will work. Something for tomorrow, but
overall quite encouraging for running linux on at least power3 systems.
Full blow ppc64 boxen tho would seem to be a problem tho as on some of
those you can only run the 64 bit kernel and I'm not sure the installer
will react well to a uname of ppc64. But knows! Certainly worth a try
for the adventurous soul.
Regards,
Tom
--
Tom Gall - [Embedded] [ppc|ppc64] Code Monkey
Peace, Love and Linux Technology Center "Where's the ka-boom?
(h) tgall@rochcivictheatre.org supposed to be an earth
(w) tom_gall@vnet.ibm.com shattering ka-boom!"
(w) 507-253-4558 -- Marvin Martian
http://www.ibm.com/linux/ltc
Reply to: