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Re: starmax 3000 boot settings



On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 02:18:31PM +0000, Nicholas Helps wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> This is no doubt old hat to all you dyed in the wool linux people, but I'm fairly new to the game and so I am 
> having a few problems. I'll briefly tell you what I have done and where I have gotten stuck at.
> 
> Downloaded woody CD images (first two only for the time being - CD#1 is NONUS version) and burned ISO images. 
> Downloaded the two boot install images and made floppies.
> Backup up all my Mac OS stuff off my internal IDE (1.2GB) HD.
> Inserted floppy 1 and booted. Inserted floppy 2 at request and got to install menu.
> Chose language, chose kbd, etc and made it all the way through to make system bootable. As far I could tell 
> everything was fine and I installed the base system and kernel. I partitioned the HD so that there is a partition 
> map at hda1(few KB), a linux native at hda2 (1.1GB) and a linux swap at hda3 (100MB).
> Once I made the system bootable (using quik), I restarted. The first time I did this all I got was a blank screen. 
> I then went off and read about quik and open firmware. I also tried zapping the pram. This didn't help.
> I then booted back into the boot floppies and once everything got going, I opened a second consol and used 
> nvsetenv to look at and alter the firmware:
> 
> Set input/output devices to kbd and screen.
> Auto-boot left set at true.
> Set boot-device to ata/ata-disk@0:0
> no boot-file set

Set boot-file to Linux, and after a few seconds quik will choose that for you.

Linux (capital L) is the name of the image section in the default quik.conf.

> On restart I get a white screen with some text on it about quik second stage boot, woody.., then a boot: prompt. I 
> tried entering "linux", "boot", "vmlinux". It kept asking for a path to the kernel. So I tried things like 
> dev/hda2/vmlinux, etc. None of these worked.

quik doesn't cooperate very well when manually naming kernel paths. 
It's much better at picking images from quik.conf.

> Back into the install process again and using a second consol showed that there does not appear to be a linux 
> kernel on the HD. From what I understand it should be at the root (/) directory. All there is at that place is 
> "rclinux". There is no "vmlinux". From what I read, this is what the kernel should be called. The install manual 
> mentions very little about anything like this and basically says quik will set up everything.

The system you are installing appears under /target inside the installer.
You would find /target/etc/quik.conf and /target/vmlinux. Check that
the quik.conf points to a kernel in /boot/, or else cp the kernel file
physically to / and then change the quik.conf to match. To install quik
within the installer shell, do 

cp /target/etc/quik.conf /etc/quik.conf
quik -v

> Presumably I am missing something very simple. I did see a "quirk" of "quik" for the starmax where it said what 
> the boot-device should be set to (as above) and somewhere else that is said you usually do not need to set a 
> boot-file.
> 
> To be honest, I am getting lost in all the firmware and quik stuff. As I said above, I can't find vmlinux anywhere 
> on my HD and I also can't find a quik.conf file. Without either of these, I would imagine that linux can't boot. 
> It might also explain why all the common suggestions for solving problems by entering "default values" (like 
> debian, or linux, or vmlinux) don't work.

vmlinux is normally a symlink to the real kernel file in /boot.
Since quik doesn't do symlinks, your quik.conf should not point
to vmlinux (the symlink). It should point to the real kernel
file - which may be more easily found at the root level where
vmlinux sits. I'd recommend copying your kernel file from /target/boot
to /target as I mentioned above, just to eliminate the possibility
that quik is not reading the filesystem properly.
 
-- 
"The way the Romans made sure their bridges worked is what 
we should do with software engineers. They put the designer 
under the bridge, and then they marched over it." 
-- Lawrence Bernstein, Discover, Feb 2003



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