Re: AmigaONE && Debian (unstable?)
Hi,
Jens Schmalzing wrote:
Turbo Fredriksson writes:
Anyone have an idea how to get 'official' support for the AmigaONE
in Debian GNU/Linux?
Implement it.
If the kernel source needs patching, try to get the patch into the
main kernel.org tree, or the Debian kernel-source package, or the
Debian kernel-patch-powerpc package. If there is a kernel-image
package already that should work (-powerpc, I presume?) but doesn't,
find out how the .config itself, or the support scripts mkinitrd and
mkvmlinuz need to be changed.
< Massive thread ensues >
Hey guys,
I've worked quite a lot with the A1 and Linux. I see that there is a bit
of confusion in this thread, so I'll mention/clear some points (hopefully).
First, the A1 is a PPC board, and there is a whole web site with info,
pictures etc about the board here http://amigaone-linux.sf.net.
The web site was set up for AmigaOne specific kernel development (the
plan was that the patches would then move upstream). Note that the
information is slightly out of date.
The source tree for the AmigaOne is present at that web site. (Yeah we
need to make a patch against a stock tree).
The firmware of the AmigaOne is known as UBoot. This used to be known as
PPCBoot. It is open source firmware. The web site is http://uboot.sf.net
The majority of AmigaOne owners that run Linux on their board, run
Debian. This is because I made an unofficial port of the Debian Woody
"bf installer" for the AmigaOne early last year, and apart from that
(and an old SuSe version), there wasn't anything else until recently
(there is also a YDL installer now, but it is un-maintained and will
gradually grow out of date).
I sent my patches to the bf dev list, but no one seemed particuarly
interested, no matter.
At the time that the installer was built, there was no boot loader, so
the AmigaOne would boot Linux in a similar way to the PReP PPC machines.
This is the best that UBoot can offer.
You merge the kernel (and optionally a ramdisk) into a file, create a
special image (using a tool "mkimage"), and you "dd" it to a partition.
This has vastly changed now. An AmigaOS4 developer added Linux booting
support to the OS4 boot loader. So there is a boot loader for the
AmigaOne that can boot Linux by reading a kernel image off an ext2/ext3
partition. The boot loader uses some functions from GRUB, and will be
open source too. Stuff like yaboot does not work of course, since we
don't have an OF. One condition of the boot loader is that it only
operates with RDB partitions - no big deal, that's the Amiga partition
scheme. For those that don't want Amiga partition schemes, UBoot can be
used with the old method (i.e like a PReP machine).
It would be nice to get 'official' support for the AmigaOne into Debian
though, and I'm happy to take part in co-operation with Turbo et al.
Regards,
Ross..
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