Best setup for Multia!
I finally figured out what works best for my multia, which is a
166mhz with 256megs of ram and (now) a 500mb internal scsi drive -- with
also a 1.8gb external scsi for compiling. While I still have etch
installed on the external drive, I essentially gave up on etch for the
multia and went back to sarge.
Of course, since the install for sarge on alpha is broken for the
multia's at least -- both the CD install and the netboot install just
crash everytime, even with serial console -- what I had to do was first
install woody from CD, then do a dist-upgrade to sarge, which leaves you
with a 2.2 kernel. I had done this much earlier and had a running sarge
system, but only had the original 340mb internal scsi, and had no room
for source code to compile a new kernel. And, unfortunately, hostap is
not in the stock debian 2.4 kernels.
So, now, with bigger drives, I was able first to install the
2.4.27-3 generic kernel (which enabled me to mount the ext3 partions on
my external drive) and compile a new kernel. Pcmcia-cs works great with
sarge and the 2.4 kernels, but in order to install hostap (or
linux-wlan-ng) for the prism2 cards, you have to have compiled your own
kernel first. And that, previously, was what I couldn't do due to lack
of space, and what led me to want to install etch and/or the 2.6 kernels
in the first place.
But, since pcmcia is apparantly totally broken in alpha etch, at
least for the multia, I'm glad I went back to sarge, because I've also
found that it seems to run much faster and works much better than etch
on my multia. Boot is definitely quicker, and, when I had tried to
compile kernels before under etch, I got error after error and never was
able to compile any of the 2.6 kernels with etch. Now, however, with
sarge and the 2.4 kernels, it's a breeze -- slow, glacial, takes at
least a day and half to compile and make the debian kernel package and
initrd, but it goes very smoothly. Don't know why etch and 2.6 were such
a problem.
One thing I noticed when I first tried to compile the
2.4.27-3-generic source though was there is no option in the config for
choosing the noname box instead of the generic -- which is definitely
what you want to do for the multia. So I went to kernel.org and got the
latest 2.4 stable kernel, which is 2.4.34.1 and used that, disabled most
every module I didn't need to save compile time and disk space and it
works great.
If any other multia owner tries this, one thing to watch out for is
choosing the right ethernet driver -- NOT the TULIP -- and scsi driver
-- not the ncr, although the ncr seems to work okay.
Once I had the new kernel compiled and running, the hostap-source
compiled and installed very easily, and after installing the
hostap-utils, I even upgraded the firmware on the cards, things work
very nice. Right now I'm compiling the full source for busybox and will
use that to replace coreutils, findutils, fileutils and shellutils. Or
most of them.
Maybe I'll even try compiling uclibc again -- maybe that will
actually work with the 2.4 kernels -- I've never gotten it to compile on
my 2.6 boxes.
--
Harmon Seaver
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