Re: Debian on PPC IBM RS6000

["Carlos O'Donell Jr." <carlos@baldric.uwo.ca>]

> Dear Friends,
> This is the first time that i write to you
> and i don't know is this email destination
> is rigth for my questions.
> If No, please, tell me where email.
> 
> I have:
> IBM RISC System/6000
> model 43P-140
> other informations:
> 640e 200 MHz
> 7043 44-L0258
> firmware TIG 97112.
> Actually, this PPC runs with AIX IBM, and
> i would format all and install DEBIAN PPC.
> 
> I have created, using rawrite3 utility under MS-DOS, floppies with files:
> first with         boot-2.4.15.img
> second with    root.bin.
> 
> I found that the 2.2.x linux kernels are not working on these machine.
> 
> My PPC can boot from floppy directly, infact there is this option in the
> bios boot sequence
>

I have a whole cluster of PPC 604e Systems. They are in reality
Powerseries 840 and 850 boxes from IBM.

I'm not sure what you are getting... on the serial?

I have had lots of success with those system. In particular I
netboot the kernel for the nodes via tftp.

The fact that you are _getting_ the branching at the beggining
of the kernel means that you have the right arch disk (PREP or CHRP).

The following is what I did (sorta old info):

1. Get the following images for the PReP architecture: 
   boot1440.bin, resc1440.bin, root1440.bin, drv14-1.bin 
   and dd them to floppies

2. Boot the nodes with the boot1440.bin floppy. 
   At the lilo prompt, pass this argument to it 
   (root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1). 
   This tells it to load the root filesystem into 
   memory, and to find it in the floppy drive

3. When promtped, insert the root1440.bin floppy. 
   It will now load it into memory

4. Continue the installation, and select the floppy 
   installation method. It will now prompt you for 
   the resc1440.bin and drv14-1.bin floppies.

5. Now you need to install the base system. We used 
   NFS to install the base system (base2_2.tgz)

6. Now use apt and dselect to install the appropriate packages. 
   We have a list of packages we wanted, and we used 
   'cat plist | xargs -n1 apt-get -y install' to get it to 
   automagically install everything. Note: before you do this, 
   you must select the appropriate dselect method and update the 
   package list (apt-get update). 

Cheers,
Carlos Jr.
-------------------------
The Baldric Project
http://www.baldric.uwo.ca
-------------------------