New scratch build of boot-floppies (UP1000, serial console, TFTP)

[David Huggins-Daines <dhd@linuxcare.com>]

Hi,

http://www.debian.org/~dhd/disks-alpha-20000319/

Things of note:

1) Nautilus/APB support - please test this on the UP1000!  Also I'd
   appreciate comments on the Nautilus-related documentation.

2) Serial console installations should basically work now (they were
   rather broken on all archs, and in fact not really enabled on Alpha
   at all).  You just have to boot with console=ttyS0 (I really tried
   to find a way to hack around this in aboot, but the CTB entry
   pointed to by the TTY_DEV environment variable in SRM comes up as
   "multifunction" regardless of whether I boot using serial or
   graphics console :P)

3) Nikita's tftpboot.img stuff is built by default (I'm considering
   just incorporating the relevant parts of the kernel source tree in
   the boot-floppies CVS, as they're pretty small and we have to patch
   them anyway).  There's also a root.tar.gz which isn't particularly
   useful since I didn't put in a netbootable kernel image - but that
   can certainly be arranged (we need to include objstrip in the aboot
   package)

I've tested this stuff on a headless DS10 and it works okay - it has a
tendency to hang unexpectedly at random moments, which I have no hope
of figuring out the cause of.  Other issues:

 - Alpha's netbase is out of date, and I didn't get around to building
   a new one for the boot-floppies (my signing key is on a floppy at
   home), so DHCP won't work when you reboot since it wants to use
   dhcpcd.  Just run pump manually.

 - fdisk is still a bit strange, not all of DEC's and my patches are
   in it yet.  I'm a bit curious about whether minlabel would be a
   better choice or not...

-- 
David Huggins-Daines, Senior Linux Consultant, Linuxcare, Inc.
613.562.1239 tel
dhuggins@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.