installation report PC-9821Lt2/3A (was Re: Debian on a NEC PC98)
Okay, I guess I ought to let you all know how my PC98 install went.
The machine is a PC-9821Lt2/3A with 35 MB of memory and a 344 MB HD.
Not impressive, but hey it works.
I got a working set of floppies from
http://www.debian.or.jp/debian-jp/dists/stable-jp/main/disks-pc98/curr
ent/
There are two flavours, pe and ce, but they only differ as to the kind
of network cards they support. As I didn't have a network card (apart
from PCMCIA, but see below) either should work. I used the pc9800pe
floppies to boot and did not use any boot parameters. Just pressed
enter and off I went. Oh, by the way, these boot floppies are
completely in Japanese.
I partitioned the hard disk to allow for a 35 MB swap partition and
use the rest for /. Not much use splitting that further up with that
little space. I put the swap partition at the beginning just in case
the HD uses ZBR in which case that should give slightly better
performance. Oh, by the way again, I did this from within the shell
that the installer provides on the second virtual terminal. You can
switch with GRPH-f2 (there is no ALT key).
Initialized swap and the Linux partition (dropped pre-2.2 support) and
mounted it as /. Installed kernel and drivers from floppy. I tried
configuration of the PCMCIA card, but that hung badly. Still have to
look into it, but it meant installing the base system from floppy,
ouch! Oh well, that wasn't the first time. Masochistic, me?
Skipped the configuration of device drivers, set a host name and was
busy changing floppies for a while to install the base system. Then
set the time zone, before I tried to install the boot loader on the
HD. Too bad, that's not supported so you'll need to create a boot
floppy. Rebooted from that, enabled MD5 and shadow passwords, set a
root password, didn't zap PCMCIA, didn't use PPP, left the APT config
for what it was (no sources 'cause I'm not connected), trudged through
the dselect stuff and was done.
Note, after the reboot you'll see a bunch of messages from debconf; it
complains about not being able to initialize the slang front-end and
falls back on the dialog one. No big deal, just a bit annoying.
Booting from floppy is all nice and dandy, but being able to boot
without is a lot nicer. Tried lilo first. Cobbled together a config
that should work, installed it and reboot. No go, bummer! Oh well,
now I have an excuse to get familiar with grub98. Read the docs, gave
it a spin and ... no go. It has probloms finding things in the /boot
directory. I tried the interactive interface and via tab-completion
noticed that it thinks there is an extra character appended to the dir
name. Saw the same for some other names.
Then I pulled down grub-0.5-pc9800-20011112.tar.gz from
http://www.kmc.kyoto-u.ac.jp/proj/linux98/arch/i386/boot/grub98/v0.5.h
tml
(on another machine of course!) copied the stage1 and stage2 boot
loaders via floppy to /boot/grub/ on the PC-98, made a simple menu.lst
and installed that.
For reference, you can copy the bootloaders to floppy with
$ dd if=bin/stage1 of=/dev/fd0
$ dd if=bin/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 seek=1
from the top level grub source directory and you can peel them back
off again with
$ dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/boot/grub/stage1 bs=1 count=512
$ dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/boot/grub/stage2 bs=1 count=33764 seek=1
Adjust the count to the size of the stage[12] files if necessary.
Booting from this floppy I installed grub with my menu.lst on /dev/hda
with / on /dev/hda2 by
grub> install=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/stage1 (hd0)
(hd0,1)/boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 p /boot/grub/menu.lst
The menu.lst is very simple:
timeout = 10
title = Debian GNU/Linux
root = (hd0,1)
kernel = (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.16-pc9800pe root=/dev/hda2
Having done that I can now boot directly from the hard disk. Since
the lilo and grub98 from the base system are of no use, I purged them.
There's a couple of other packages I purged 'cause of the small amount
of disk space and plans to upgrade to woody (yes, without a network
connection) and I also ripped out non-essential files like message
catalogs (a la purge-locale or whatever that package is called).
Anyways, further fun experiences will have to wait a little till I get
the relevant .debs transferred.
Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen
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