I've just finally built myself a new kernel (2.4.31 from linux-mips) and itactually boots. The problem is (and I dont know if anyone has encouteredthis before): I see CoLo loading, then the kernel loads BUT it ignores the"execute root=/dev/hda4 console=ttyS0,115200" line from my/boot/default.colo file. If I switch back to my 2.4.27-r5k-cobalt kernel it works (it uses the default.colo arguments). I even tried setting the kernelcommand line hardcoded into the kernel, and it still does the same thing.Add the debian patches as well, one of them implements an altered command line parsing.
I don't know about patches, but I've found something this morning that needs to be changed in arch/mips/kernel/setup.c that actually makes it use a hard coded argument (and it works)
One more thing, this box was just freshly installed 2 days ago with Sarge(since then I'm having a headache figuring out the new kernel issue becausethe current one has network connectivity issues)As described in http://lists.debian.org/debian-mips/2005/07/msg00053.html you can build and try a hopefully fixed 2.4.27 kernel, so far I got no response for that mail.
so far with my new (but missing stuff) kernel, the network works flawlessy, altough slow ... but we all know cobalts have a slow network issue anyway
by the way, do cobalts (raq2) need CONFIG_DE4X5 in the kernel or will CONFIG_TULIP do it? I'm a bit confused about this
thanks for your time :)viz