aboot

[Doug Larrick <doug@ties.org>]

The aboot in Debian is severly out of date.  I've just gone through
some difficulties, and thought I'd spare others the trouble.

I decided to convert my system (PC164LX) from AlphaBIOS/MILO to
SRM/aboot, for a couple reasons:
1. it boots quicker
2. my colleagues (I work for Compaq in the Alpha chip group) tell me
that SRM has better/more recent PALcode than MILO.  This is evidently
more important for EV6-based systems.
3. I'm crazy in the head, and had nothing better to do with my evening.

I had to back up one of my drives and repartition it using BSD
disklabels, as in the new SRM HOWTO on AlphaLinux.org.  This was a big
PITA, but presented no real difficulties.

I also had to rebuild my kernel with SRM and BSD disklabel support. 
Wanting to upgrade to 2.2.14 was the motivation behind this whole mess.

The big problem is that the aboot in Potato (0.5-4) doesn't understand
recently-created ext2 filesystems.  ext2 has had a couple of
extensions added to it, evidently, that our version of aboot doesn't
understand.

Anyway, to fix the problem, I downloaded the RPM for aboot 0.5-15 from
RedHat and installed via alien.  I can boot now...

-Doug

-- 
Doug Larrick  doug@ties.org  doug.larrick@compaq.com  AIM: DougLarick