debian on ruffian
Well, I just got a ruffian (or rather my SO did for work) and I've attempted to
install debian-unstable on it. It now seems to be mostly working, but I did
stumble a few times on the way.
Problems:
1) No ruffian rescue/driver disks; at least I can't find them. I crufted
together a working rescue disk by taking the kernel from a RedHat install disk.
I still couldn't get a milo prompt, so I ended up booting milo from the
ruffian.img found on gatekeeper, and then inserting the hacked rescue disk, and
not using any modules.
1a) The machine would crash after a while unless I told milo that there was ony
224 rather than 256 M of memory (after reading about this problem on axp-list).
2) X server wouldn't start with errors about IOPL. Making /etc/alpha_systype ->
Miata cured it (after a couple of guesses). I suppose this will have to wait
for a fixed libc. Could the install process at least make a guess or ask the
user?
3) hwclock still complains about IOPL after the above fix. Is this normal?
4) During the install stage some of the dependencies seemed to cause problems;
in particular the tex packages wouldn't install the first time round. Rerunning
the install stage cured it. Unfortunately I didn't catch the reason for the
failure before it scrolled off the screen.
The machine is now working (and I even got OSF/1 netscape running). A few
things are still kooky:
The X server generates unaligned accesses when running netscape.
The X font server segfaults and dies when contacted by the X server.
fdisk generates unaligned accesses.
update-menus segfaulted during the install; looked like a near-null pointer
dereference (00000010).
No doubt more things will show up soon.
If anyone wants to try generating ruffian rescue/driver disks I'll test them as
far as booting them; I can't do much more than that since the machine is doing
useful work now.
Anyway, looks like it is working, and I'm really glad not to have to run Red
Hat :-)
David
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