[CLUE-Tech] Debian install on alpha.

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 12-15 16:24, Dave Anselmi wrote:
> Sean LeBlanc wrote:
> 
> > Did you get any CD support working? Were you not able to boot
> > from CD, BTW, or did you just go straight to booting from floppy first?
> 
> Well, the CD works in Linux.  I don't have any bootable CDs, so I didn't try
> that.  Almost all my debian installs are boot from floppy, install off the net.
> 
> When you tried to boot from a CD, are you sure you had the right device?  Mine
> seems to be SCSI ID 4, or dka4 from the SRM prompt.  SRM seems much less willing
> to tell me what devices are what, but I haven't worked on it much.
> 
> You might also try checking the terminators on the SCSI bus.  There's one at the
> end of the cable inside, and one on the SCSI connector on the back.  If that
> doesn't help, and the CD works otherwise, thank the BSD folks for giving you a
> bad image.

Nope, I just didn't have the right device...dka0 is the first HD, I think,
and dka4 was the CD. It booted just fine from CD when I gave it the right
device to boot from. :) Now I have FreeBSD on the Alpha.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to get setiathome for FreeBSD, and failing
that, I'm trying to figure out how to get Linux binary compat on Alpha for
FreeBSD, and then get setiathome. I'm also trying to get X 4.0 going, which
is proving interesting. In the meantime, I'm trying out 3.x, to see if that
works at all. Did you bother setting up X in Debian, or did you think the
lack of disk space made it a bad idea?

BTW, I actually cracked my FreeBSD book and looked for Alpha. Well what do
you know...they actually cover Alpha install to some extent (a whole page or
so, anyway). They mention some SRM stuff that may be of interest:

show device, which prints out a list of devices.

They say:

"You can specify which kernel file to load and what boot options to
use with the -file and -flags options to boot:"

>>>boot -file kernel.old -flags s

So far, I haven't needed this. I also wonder if this isn't maybe a misprint
since the device is missing.

They also cover how to have SRM boot up FreeBSD automatically on startup,
which should apply just as much to Linux:

>>>set boot_osflags a
>>>set bootdef_dev dkc0
>>>set auto_action BOOT

Of couse, I think the device for us is dka0.

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at attbi.com Yahoo:seanleblancathome 
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