Re: Problem with potato clgen install on Amiga
Ok, I'm seeing similar problems. A3000, G-Force, Spectrum.
> I recently downloaded the amigainstall.tgz package and base 2.2.tgz from
> dists/potato/disks/current. However, when I try to run the StartInstall_clgen
> script, my system hangs after pressing return a second time in the bootstrap
> shell window. The screen switches, but the debugging text never comes up.
> When I try to boot with no startup sequence and run the startinstall_clgen
> from the command line, I get he additional error message "Unable to determine
> size of ramdisk file root.bin." Does anyone know what could be going on here?
My observations are compatible with two clgen related bugs in the linux-m68k
kernel:
1) The clgen driver (clgenfb.c) is drowning in printk statements which are
not prefixed with DEBUG. The overall effect is that these 'printk's
obscure the system boot messages as well as everything else that happens
to be printed to the console(s). More debug messages also if one switches
between virtual consoles.
I solved this by setting up a minimum potato system and then compiling
a new kernel with printks prefixed with DEBUG.
2) The real bug is that during installation all installer output is garbled.
(Same symptoms to be observed if one configures the kernel with
make menuconfig.)
All areas on the console into which the (curses based?) installer writes
text are obscured by vertical white or black lines (two pixels wide
every five pixels or so), making the text more or less unreadable. The
display can be refreshed by switching to another console and then back,
but with the distribution kernel, problem 1) rears its head: installer
output being obscured or scrolled off the screen by clgen debug messages.
I thought at first this was a problem with the curses library, which I
presume is linked statically into the installer, but it only happens
if I'm on a clgen console. I.e. it happens only when installing with
StartInstall_clgen, but not with StartInstall. (I've also had this
problem for ages when configuring a kernel with make menuconfig under
RedHat, but again, I thought this was a problem with RH's curses libs.)
I am well aware that nobody is probably putting any work into the clgen
driver, as a completely rewritten version has appeared in 2.3.12 (IIRC).
Which I can't get to work at all ...
> Incidentally, I was previously able to run the slink version of the clgen
> install, do a complete installation of the "dialup" profile linux and get
> X-windows up and running... that was before I tried to edit the Xsession file
> to configure Gnome and buggered everything up!
On my system, X is totally unusable under Debian. This is unrelated to the
choice of window manager; even if I configure twm, it is more or less
impossible to do anything, it's dead slow and hangs a lot. It's not a
hardware problem, X works quite well on the same machine under RedHat 5.2,
NetBSD 1.4.2, OpenBSD 2.7 (and did previously work under RedHat 5.0, 5.1;
NBSD 1.4, 1.4.1; OBSD 2.6).
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