Re: Motorola MTX
On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Adrian Cox wrote:
> Has anybody got Debian installed on a Motorola MTX? I've got a project
> for which the hardware is a good fit (7 PCI slots, on-board SCSI and
> ethernet, same cpu as my embedded targets), but I want to be reasonably
> sure about the software before I place an order.
>
> I'm pretty sure the kernel supports it, but I'm looking for a recipe for
> starting with a shrink wrapped motherboard and scsi disk, and ending up
> with a stand-alone booting system. I can attach floppy disks, SCSI
> CD-ROMS, serial consoles, and NFS servers as required during the
> installation.
Great. You can be my first "victim". :) We run Debian on a variety of MCG
boards and systems. 7 slot PCI MTX is actually an MTX+ (I thought that
was the marketing name). There's a minor (hopefully) MPIC IDE bug on that
particular board that hangs the current PReP kernel image we are using,
though it should get fixed RSN. I have an MTX 604/400 as a fulltime
server/devel platform which also runs X11 (clgenfb), several demo VME/CPCI
systems with 604/750's running things, etc so things are quite functional
(beyond the broken dependencies in potato). In order to run X11 you must
have a CL543x or 5446-based board because the boards that are supported by
PPCBUG are quite limited (for now). Until we get a few more things fixed,
you need to patch the kernel with some PReP clgenfb changes to run the
fbdev server.
I have base installation images suitable for tftp/nfs installation
available at http://master.debian.org/~porter.
You must boot bootprep.bin from something other than floppy since it is
too large to fit. The nfs driver is built in so that you can jump down to
"Configure Network" before installing the rescue and driver images. Once
the network is configured, an nfs option will appear when installing the
system so you can get a full base system installed completely over the
network. Note that you _MUST_ partition your SCSI drive in a specific way
(due to the PReP bootloaders limitations) in order for the installer to
setup automagic booting from the hard drive. Always make a 1-2MB type 41
PReP boot partition as /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 must be your root fs. On a
Motorola system the kernel defaults to root from /dev/sda2. When
selecting "Make OS bootable from harddrive", the installer will look for a
type 41 partition and write the boot kernel there to make the system
bootable. You can also make a bootable floppy automatically from the
installer.
I'm trying to free up some time to finish the PowerPC/PReP doc updates for
installation, but for now this is all there is.
--
Matt Porter Motorola Computer Group
matt_porter@mcg.mot.com CIBU Linux Support
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