GDB"> X"> dmesg"> boothack"> amiboot"> HDToolBox"> ]> $Date: documentation in progress Jesper Skov

jskov@cygnus.co.uk

1998, 1999 Jesper Skov This document contains frequently asked questions (and answers) about &linapus; (&linux; for &amiga; &pup; Systems) as well as general documentation of the &linapus; port. Hello! Welcome to &thisdoc;. I hope you will find what you are looking for... But wait! Before you read on, please consider this plea for help. Given the broad subject, it is unfortunately not possible to cover everything Linux related in &thisdoc;. Only &linapus; issues are covered, and to some extend, a few generic &amiga; issues. This is not entirely bad, because that leaves the remaining (and majority) of documentation issues in the hands of more capable people than myself. What you should expect to find though, are relevant links to other documentation resources so you have somewhere else to go when you get past the first few steps. Even if this document only covers &linapus; related issues, some users (perhaps you are one) will get their first taste of &linux;, an operating system vastly different from ADOS, via &linapus;, possibly reading &thisdoc; as an introduction. Therefore it is imperative that the documentation is relevant, up-to-date and has all the necessary resource links a first time Linux user may need. Given that I, and other people who have used &linapus; for a while, already have working installations, and have sorted out most of the problems faced by a newbie, it is important that you help keeping &thisdoc; up-to-date. While that may sound scary, it shouldn't -- what you are asked to do is: Point out weaknesses of &thisdoc; so they can be corrected (preferrably with your feedback). When you figure something out that had you puzzled, write up a few paragraphs about the problem and the solution and submit it to &thisdoc;. In particular, you should be aware that there is no fancy AI collecting experiences, tips, workarounds, or summarizing discussions from the mailing list. If nobody follows up on a problem, it's likely to remain a problem for the next user. Therefore, if you get help to overcome a problem, please consider taking a bit of time out of your (I'm sure) busy schedule, and write something (a new FAQ entry, a new section, a correction to an existing text) for &thisdoc;. Thanks, Jesper The &linux; port for APUS (&amiga; &pup; Systems) was started in 1997 with support from &p5; who provided 3 developer boards to Jes Sørensen, Roman Zippel and Jesper Skov. Initially it seemed that the proprietary information needed to make the port would make a bad mix with the open source model of &linux;. Indeed, it postponed the public release of &linapus; somewhat, but it all worked out in the end. &p5; have approved all the released information and, sparse commenting aside, all source code changes are freely available. I refer to the following ports of &linux; in this document: &linm68k; The port for the Motorola &cpum68k; CPU family. This is what you would use for running &linux; on an &amiga; without &pup;. It is also the port that &linapus; is based on, since all the drivers are the same. &linppc; The port for the Motorola &cpuppc; CPU family. The home of this port is at www.linuxppc.org. This port has multi-machine support, including PMAC, PREP, CHRP and partially APUS. &linapus; The port targeted at &amiga;s with &p5;'s &pup; hardware. With time, it will be a proper part of &linppc;. It may also become a base for the support of &cpuppc; cards from other &amiga; vendors. I will try to keep this document up to date, but if you find something that is obsolete or wrong, please let me know. Things marked with FIXME are known to be incomplete or (maybe) wrong. New changes in the document are marked with colors. Recent changes are red, and as the changes age they fade to blue and then black over a period of 14 days or so. Sections containing these colored changes will be dated so they can be easily identified from the table of contents. The colors work fine (IMO) with the default Netscape colors. If you use a customized color scheme, you might want to generate the HTML pages without the colors: use the DocBook db2html and the file faq.sgml from the docs directory at &sunsite;. Precompiled kernel images and a special version of &amiboot; (called &boothack;) can be downloaded from &sunsite;. Before you download anything, you should read and to prevent yourself from getting a nasty surprise. Also, I suggest you start by downloading only what is needed to get a minimal system installed (see ) - if this is working you can then download the applications you want to run. The kernel archives at &sunsite; (see ) are named vmapus-YYMMDD.lzh and contain three files: vmlinux (the actual kernel image), System.map (a list of symbols/addresses in the kernel) and .config (describing how the kernel was configured). You only need the kernel image to boot &linux;, but the other files may help track down bugs. Please read for information about how you can use a kernel dump and the System.map file to help yourself or others locate a bug. Precompiled kernels are provided for the 2.2.x series kernels (stable release). The 2.3.x kernels are only available in source form. People who want the bleeding edge stuff should compile their kernels themselves (see ). The precompiled kernel image includes drivers for the hardware listed below. The drivers are exactly the same as in &linm68k; so they will not work better (or worse, hopefully) and you need to take the same precautions with some of the drivers (e.g., CyberVision) as you would in &linm68k;. Consult the &linm68k; FAQ (see ) if you have problems. A list of drivers that are known to work can be found in . DISPLAY BLOCK CHAR NET SCSI OCS, ECS, AGA, CyberVision, CyberVision/3D, PM2 (CyberVision/PPC) The driver included in the precompiled kernel is an old beta. If you want the up-to-date version get the latest sources from the PM2 webpage (see ). Don't expect the precompiled version to behave as described on the webpage! , RetinaZ3, Clgen &amiga; floppy, A1200/A4000 IDE, IDEDoubler, Buddha &amiga; serial, &amiga; keyboard, &amiga; mouse, &gvp; IO extender (ser) On some machines, the IO extender may cause the kernel to hang at startup. A crude hack can be used to work around this problem - ask on the mailing list for details if necessary. , MultifaceIII ser, Whippet Ariadne, AriadneII, A2065, Hydra, A1200 PCMCIA/NE2000 A3000, A4091+A4000T You have to disable the use of BATs to map main memory. Add "nobats" to your kernel options. There are still some stability problems with this driver under &linapus;. , BlizzardPPC You have to disable the use of BATs to map main memory. Add "nobats" to your kernel options. , A2091, GVP11 If you have hardware for which you would like to see an existing &linm68k; driver included, please let me know. You should restrict your request to something you need to get your system installed as the precompiled kernel is already pretty big. Some drivers will be include for testing purposes (like sound) and be removed again when they have been reported as working. The kernel also includes these software drivers: FS PARTTBL PROTOCOLS MISC affs, dos, ext2, iso9660, minix, nfs, proc, vfat, hfs amiga, msdos, mac ppp, slip ram disk, z2/motherboard swap, loop In this chapter I will try to help you through the steps of installing a &linapus; system. This is based on the &rhppc; system - if you want to install another package distribution or compile applications yourself, you are pretty much on your own. The only reason for describing how to install a &rhppc; system and not &debian; is that &rhppc; seems to be (at the moment) the primary system used by &linppc;. By the way, &rhppc; is not coordinated by &rh; but by &linppc; developers. It might be a good idea to read this entire chapter before you start downloading anything - so you know what is required for what you want to do. If you don't know how to do some of the things mentioned here (or are unclear about something) you should get an install help text. You should be able to find several by looking for links at www.linux-m68k.org. If you have corrections, additions or comments to this, please let me know. Your feedback is important for this chapter since new users (after you there may be others coming this way, you know!) will probably try to follow this - any misinformation or errors no matter how trivial should be corrected. You need to get files from the following: , , , and . You should get the following files (leave them in the same directory): misc/kernel-options.txt misc/ramdisk.image.gz The ramdisk.image.gz is primarily used to test that &linapus; actually boots. If you know it boots, don't bother downloading it. boothack/bhYYMMDD.lha 2.2.x/vmapus-YYMMDD.lzh install/redhat/apus-rh-ramdiskimageYYMMDD.gz Unpack the archives (the version of lha I use under &linux; appends the suffix .lzh and I'm bound to forget renaming them to .lha - so I don't): lha x bhYYMMDD.lha lha x vmapus-YYMMDD.lzh Leave the ram disk compressed, or it will not be usable. This section describes how to boot the kernel. The basic command required to boot &linapus; using a ram disk as main file system is: bootstrap --apus -k vmlinux -r ramdisk.image.gz root=/dev/ram The root=/dev/ram option tells the kernel to read its data from the ram disk, -k specifies the kernel image to boot, -r the ram disk file and --apus that the &cpuppc; should be the CPU starting the kernel. The above is how you would boot on a simple system. When issuing the command bootstrap you may need additional parameters (at the end) for the kernel to work on your system - this is just the same as if you were booting a &linm68k; system. Display selection, display resolution, SCSI driver options and other things are controlled by such additional options. There are two specific &linapus; kernel options: 60nsram Use this to remove RAM waitstates. It requires 60ns RAM. nobats Use this to prevent the use of BATs for mapping of main memory. Selecting this incurs a small performance overhead, but some drivers depend on each memory page being individually mapped (A4000T/A4091 SCSI drivers). Other kernel options exist, but are shared with &linm68k; and other ports so I don't describe them here. One of the files you should download (kernel-options.txt) describes the options you can use. The &linm68k; website/FAQ should also contain some general information about the boot options. A ram disk image is used to get started. The ram disk contains a minimal &linux; system from which you prepare your disks. When you have done this (described in sections below), you will normally use root=/dev/xxx (where xxx is the root partion) to boot your &linapus; system. Notice that booting the &linapus; kernel might blank the display for as long as 30 seconds depending on the &cpuppc; speed. Some people have reported problems with copying the ram disk (and kernel) to RAM: before booting and must use a disk partition for the files. Others need to copy the files to RAM:, especially &blzppc; owners who use SCSI disks. Additional to options for making your hardware run smoothly with &linux;, you may need to restrict your memory configuration for &linapus; to work correctly. Duncan Gibb has modified Samuel Devulder's MUIRexx-based UAEWB launcher to work with &linapus;. This GUI exists to address two common problems faced by newbies: You have to read the documentation very carefully to decide which options to use when you launch APUS. You have to read it again even more carefully to get the options in the right order. The GUI is supposed to be self-explanatory through the use of MUI bubble help. This is just a quick run-down of what it can do for you. You are presented with an MUI interface with four tabs - marked "Kernel", "Display", "Disks" and, of course, "Misc" - which give you the following pages of options: Kernel Here you can pick the kernel image using an ASL requester, say whether its APUS, and turn NoBATS and 60nsRAM on and off. Display Choose the relevant display driver and pick a screenmode. Please can framebuffer device authors/fixers keep me informed of what boot options their drivers understand. Disks Tell the kernel which partition to boot from, with common choices on a pull-down picker. You can also select a ram-disk image using ASL. Misc Here you can manually add options and be fairly sure they'll end up in the right place on the command line. Again common choices like turning on debugging are quickly selected. Once you have picked the options you think will suit you, there are four things you can do with them: Save & Launch This will save your options in ENVARC:LINUX_CONFIG and ENV:LINUX_CONFIG, generate a command line and run &boothack; for you. Use & Launch This will save your options only in ENV:LINUX_CONFIG and run &boothack; for you. Exit This will save your options in ENVARC:LINUX_CONFIG and ENV:LINUX_CONFIG, but exit without running &boothack;, so you stay in AmigaOS. Cancel This will quit the GUI without saving your options and without running &boothack;. As with Preferences programs, the Project menu allows you to save custom settings under a filename of your choice (and re-load them later), and the Settings menu has options to reset to defaults or the last saved configuration. Please direct bug reports and features requests to DuncanGibb@ultramail.co.uk. I do have a ToDo list, but it's about six months behind. &linapus; only supports one block of primary memory which should be the memory on the &pup; board. It would be possible to support mutiple blocks, but since there is such a big performance penalty in using other system memory than the one on the &pup; board, it doesn't make sense. The problem is that &linux; uses memory much more aggressively than &ados; so all memory will be used constantly. Because of this it is not possible to prioritize memory blocks as it can be done under &ados;. This means that you cannot guarantee that the most CPU intensive applications actually run in the fastest memory block in the system. For this reason, &linapus; only support one block of primary memory -- the fastest. See for a way of using additional memory. If you have multiple memory blocks, the one on the &cybppc;/&blzppc; will usually have the highest priority and be selected by default. Unfortunately, this is not foolproof and you may have to explicitly define the block to be used. You control the memory &linux; can see by using a memory config file: add -m file after the --apus option. This file should contain 2 lines: on the first the size of your chip memory, on the second the starting address of the memory and its size. Here's a single example. 2097152 0x08000000 33030144 The format of memory files actually allow more memory blocks to be specified (since it was created for &linm68k;), but only one memory block can be used in &linapus;. If you have more than one block of memory in your system, you must specify the block located on the &cybppc; or &blzppc; card. You should be able to get the required numbers from showconfig or a similar tool under &ados;. Notice that the size of the memory is 512kB less than what you would expect (33030144 is 31.5MB). This is normal and required. The 512kB block is used to hold the &cpuppc; exception vector table and other &p5; stuff. If you are using the Shadow hardware on your &p5; &cybppc; or &blzppc; board to remap the &ados; ROM to RAM, you should either disable this before booting &linapus; or make sure the memory size reflects this mapping: the memory size reported by bootstrap should be 1MB smaller than the amount of RAM in your system. If it is only 512kB smaller, you have to use a memfile, specifying the total amount of RAM less the 1MB. The newer kernels (980725+) will detect the ROM shadowing (based on the memory size) and will avoid that chunk of memory. This means 512kB of your memory will remain unused in &linapus;. If you do not subtract the 512kB when specifying the size in a memfile, the kernel will not boot! Even though only one block of memory can be used for primary memory in &linapus; you can use other memory resources as a fast swapping device. Using slower memory for swapping makes sense; your applications are always running in the fast primary memory on the &pup; board, but the slower memory is still providing a much faster page swapping service than the harddisk would. You specify a block of memory for swapping by adding a line to the memory file (or by relying on the default &ados; priority ordering of the memory blocks). On my box, I have 32MB on the &cybppc; and 8MB on the motherboard of my A4000. The default &ados; ordering matches this memory file: 2097152 0x08000000 33030144 0x07800000 8388608 Again, the default &ados; priority ordering may do the correct thing for you. If not, you have to use a memory file. After booting, you need to tell &linux; to use the new swapping device. First you must add a new device node: mknod /dev/fastram b 37 4 Each time you boot you have to initialize the memory area (it doesn't keep its state over reboot as your swap partition does), and enable it with a higher priority than the swap partition (put the lines in /etc/rc.d/sysinit or similar). mkswap /dev/fastram swapon -p1 /dev/fastram In the above only a single memory chunk is used for swapping. The z2ram device can only handle one chunk at the moment. However, it can select other than the second chunk of the memory list; minor numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 select memory chunks 2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively, chunk 1 being used as primary memory. Before you go any further and start downloading packages, you should make sure that you can actually boot &linapus;. Get the required files for booting and follow the boot instructions above. If all goes well &linapus; should boot, displaying a picture of an (alcoholic :) penguin (called Tux) in the upper left corner of the screen. Text should be output, showing the progress of the boot, eventually leaving you with a # prompt and a blinking cursor (unless you boot with debug=<whatever> in which case you will not see the text, only Tux and the prompt). Your disk partitions should be recognized, notifying you of this fact with some output similar to: Partition check: hda: hda1 hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3 hdb4 This is a good sign as it means the disk driver is probably working. Depending on your hardware configuration you might not see this. Either because there exists no driver for the disk controller, or because the driver has not been included in the prebuilt kernel you booted. In both cases, report your finding to the &linapus; kernel mailing list for advice. The ram disk contains a few tools that allow you to mount disks to see if they work as expected. This ram disk was used in an older installation scheme, but unless you really know what you do, you should use the &rh; installer. If you got this far, it should be safe for you to start downloading packages for a proper installation of your &linapus; system. Good luck! Text by Thomas Lohmann The partitions for installing &linapus; should be created using &hdtbox; which is included in &ados; since version 2.x. You need at least two partitions, one for SWAP (as big as your memory is) and one for ROOT. You have to set the advanced options using &hdtbox; to ON and set the filesystem type to "CUSTOM FILE SYSTEM", the identifier has to be set as follows: 0x4c4e5800 (LNX/0) For all major &linux; partitions. 0x53575000 (SWP/0) For the swap partition. You can also set "Reserved Blocks at" to 0 for both beginning and end, but this should not be necessary. You can get precompiled &rh; &rpm; packages from www.linuxppc.org (see ) or its mirrors. You can also buy the CD-ROM (details at the WEB site). &rhppc; does not explicitly support &linapus;. None of the &linapus; developers are affiliated with the &rhppc; developers. This help is offered "AS IS" -- without any guarantees of your success. See users.iol.it/marco.dvv/marcus/htal.html for an installation guide. Text by Ken Tyler The &rhinstaller; simplifies the process of partitioning, formatting installing and configuring the &linux; &rhppc; distribution. No previously installed &linux; is required, the installation is started from &ados; by booting a kernel with the &linapus; ram disk image as the root filesystem. The &rhinstaller; has been used to install from a hard disk partition to other partitions on the same drive. Christophe Decanini reports that CDROM, FTP and NFS work. Note: See for a list of applications that are known to fail. A kernel. The latest &linapus; &rhinstaller; ram disk image (usually named apus-rh-ramdiskimageYYMMDD.gz in ). &rpm;s, base files and README.installer. Available on the &linux; &rhppc; CD-ROM or from ftp.linuxppc.org and mirrors. The base files required are comps.pmac, hdlist, skeleton.cgz and uglist. A few moments spent reading this docment, especially the Problems at the end of this section. &rpm; is the acronym for &rh; Package Manager. This is a standalone program that installs software on to a &linux; system. Files intended for use by &rpm; have the extension .rpm. The &rhinstaller has a library version of the RedHat Package Manager in the install ramdisk.image. The &rhinstaller; can partition and format hard disks, but depending on which install method you use you might need to partition your hard disk first with &hdtbox;. On a single drive system, an AFFS &ados; partition is needed to hold the &rpm;s in addition to the required &linux; and swap partitions. On a system with two or more drives, or when using the other install methods the installer can do the partitioning and formatting of the drive(s). On the AFFS drive or partition a directory RedHat with subdirectories RPMS and base should be created. The base directory should hold the comps.pmac, hdlist, skeleton.cgz and uglist files. The RPMS directory is the place for the collected &rpm;s. The suggested &rh; minimum system is about 25MB of &rpm;s which needs about 70MB of &linux; disk space. Read the README.installer for info on the comps.pmac file format. Basically there are two types of line; separator lines and &rpm; prefix lines. Separator lines start with a digit or the word 'end' and divide the &rpm;s into groups, &rpm; prefix lines are partial &rpm; names. An indented &rpm; prefix line implies that the &rpm; specified by the preceding non-indented line is required. If the comps.pmac file has entries for &rpm;s that don't exist in the RPMS directory the installer complains about them but will work, but to avoid saying OK to many warnings edit the comps.pmac file to include only the &rpm;s you have. The long filenames of some &rpm;s are chopped at the &amiga; 32 character limit but this is not a problem since &rpm; will scan the packages for their full name. Copy the apus-rh-ramdiskimageYYMMDD.gz to RAM: and boot specifying: -r ram:apus-rh-ramdiskimageYYMMDD.gz root=/dev/ram in addition to the usual --apus, -k, and -m options as required. I use (all on one line) : boothack --apus -v -d -m memfile -k ram:vmlinux -r ram:apus-rh-ramdiskimageYYMMDD.gz root=/dev/ram If all goes well a window asking if you have a color monitor will appear. (Respond to the windows with CR to enter, SPACE to toggle on/off and TAB to move between buttons, cursor arrows to move up and down lists.) Now comes a succession of windows guiding you through the installation. Reply to these to suit your system. Choose install at the install/upgrade window. Eventually you should get to the window asking what packages to install. Select what you require or the "everything" option at end of the list. After the Package install finishes there may be much disk activity as the &rpm; database is created. A few more windows, networking timezone and root password. Finally an "OK to reboot" screen should appear but wait till the disk activity stops before rebooting. During the the install, CTRL-Z brings a shell up, entering exit returns you to the installer. ALT-F1 to ALT-F4 select installer, a shell, installer log and kernel log virtual consoles. To get F11 to F20 use SHFT-F1 etc. To create a list of the suggested required &rpm;s for a minimum system, take the &rpm; prefixes in the '1 *beforeskel*' and the '1 Base' sections of the comps.pmac file and expand them into the full &rpm; name as contained in the RPMS directory. Flashing console problem. The current CD (as at 27-Oct-98) writes an /etc/inittab that attempts to start X at the default run level of 3 rather than run level 5. As kernels from 2.1.120 to the 981026 release have problems with X on some hardware, the result is alternating flashes of login screens and blank X screens. The same thing also happens if the default run level is set to 5 and the information in the XF68Config file is incorrect. To avoid this, either get a 981031 or newer kernel, or fix the installation: when the installation finishes don't respond to the "Congratulations" window but hit ALT-F2 and edit /mnt/etc/inittab. All that needs to be done to /mnt/etc/inittab is to swap the comment '#' char on the last two lines of the file. To run any of the newly installed editors you need to specify a full path, the installed system is on /mnt. Now hit ALT-F1 and confirm the "Congratulations" window. Thanks to Kolbjørn Barmen for suggesting this approach. If you have already installed the X components and are seeing the flashing console, you need to login and edit /etc/inittab and make the above change. <From Douglas Valentine> As it can be difficult to login through the flashing (although it can be done) it is easier to boot in single user mode to fix the problem. To do this add the parameter "single" to the end of your normal boothack parameters and boot Linux as normal. Linux will then boot in single user mode, which is a special maintenance mode, instead of booting up and displaying a login prompt, it will come to a prompt: sh-2.0.3# Now type pico /etc/inittab and make the change explained above, save the changes and then restart Linux as normal (remember to remove the "single" parameter again). The first version of the installer was incorrectly named apus-rh-ramdisk.image130698.gz, should have been called apus-rh-ramdisk.image980613.gz. NOTE: apus-rh-ramdisk.image981003 requires the comps file to be named comps.pmac, for earlier versions of the installer, rename comps.pmac to comps. If you have a 4.2 CD February 98 use apus-rh-ramdisk.image130698.gz, if you have the 5.0 CD or try the other install methods use apus-rh-ramdisk.image981003. The 130698 installer has problems with the 'noarch' files in the 5.0 distribution. Three of the &rpm;s on the 4.2 CD have errors when installing. dailyscript-3.1-2.ppc.rpm writes a message over the progress screen, latex2html-96.1.revh-4.ppc.rpm and xmahjongg-2.0-1A.ppc.rpm fail with install script failed. I have yet to do a full install from the 5.0 CD. Installing the suggested base was free of errors. Some users have a reported a 'missing kernel error' when attempting to install from downloaded &rpm;s. The installer tries to put a kernel into the /boot directory. There is no reason to do this as the kernels available on linuxppc.org are not &linapus; kernels. To avoid this edit the comps.pmac file and remove the two (4.2) or three (5.0) lines kernel-prep, kernel-pmac, kernel-pmac-modules. Comments, feedback about success or failure most welcome, I read the &linapus; list daily. &rh; has released a CD set named Linux Rough Cuts, containing (unsupported) &rh; ports for (among other CPUs) &cpuppc; and &cpum68k;. The &cpuppc; installation is intended for MkLinux, but it's possible to use it for &linapus;. Basically you should follow Ken's instructions above. There are a few differences, primarily because the &rhrc; CD does not contain all the required install files. But follow the below instructions, and you should come out of it OK anyway. Get the file rh-roughcuts-981108.tgz from . It contains what you need to get started. The layout of the &rhrc; CD is wrong (for the &linapus; installer), and is missing files (probably because it's intended to be used from MacOS). You have to create a correct layout. You can do this in at least two ways; 1) install via FTP and create the correct layout on another Linux box using soft links (I did this) 2) install from harddisk, having copied the CD contents to a harddisk and added the extra bits. Below the tree structure of the directory I created on Concubine for installation on Cyber (-> is a soft link to the file or directory on the &rhrc; CD). During installation I set the FTP directory to the path containing RedHat you see as the top node below. `-- RedHat |-- RPMS -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS |-- TRANS.TBL -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/TRANS.TBL |-- base | |-- RedHat -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/ | |-- TRANS.TBL -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/base/TRANS.TBL | |-- comps.pmac | |-- hdlist -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/base/hdlist | |-- skeleton.cgz | `-- uglist |-- ppc -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/ppc `-- rpmcontents.gz -> /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/rpmcontents.gz The structure is found in the rh-roughcuts-981108.tgz archive; you might want to use it as a base. If you create it yourself, there are three files in there that you need to include: comps.pmac The comps file from the base directory of the disk. The two &rpm; packages MAKEDEV and dev have been moved down as the last to be installed due to some problem I couldn't track down. skeleton.cgz The skelton file from the &rhppc; installation containing a few extra files. uglist The skelton file from the &rhppc; installation. When you have this set up, installing is done exactly as with the &rhppc; CD. The text printed out before the login prompt is from the &linppc; skeleton, so it is somewhat misleading... You can get precompiled &debppc; &deb; packages from www.debian.org (see ) or its mirrors. Currently no &cpuppc; version of the &debian; CD distribution exists. Text by Michel Dänzer First of all, be aware that installing &debian; is quite a bit harder at the moment than installing &rhppc;. I mention this so nobody downloads lots of stuff and then has to give up frustrated. There is no CD-ROM release until now, the guys at &debppc; want to wait until it's virtually equal to the i386 &deb;. However, if you've got the time and will to experiment a little, give it a go! You won't be deceived :-) Please read all the instructions carefully before you start. You need to have an empty ext2 partition, which will be the root partition. You will probably need a swap partition and maybe others as well. It's up to you how you arrange things. You might want to read first. Get a base tarball. I have uploaded one to sunsite, it should be in . Get the rd-deb-install.gz ramdisk there. You might want to download or at least look at the other files there as well. Unpack the base tarball. I'll quickly describe how to do this with the rd-deb-install.gz. Boot the ramdisk. Init will ask you to enter the runlevel, type 'S' and press enter there. Now you'll see a rather ugly prompt, however, it's bash, so you have all the commodities like command history etc. Format the root partition (I call it /dev/sda2 here because that's my root partition at home; replace it with your root partition): mke2fs /dev/sda2 Mount the soon-to-be root partition at /mnt/root: mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /mnt/root Mount the Amiga partition containing the base tarball at /mnt/amiga (Again, replace /dev/sda4 with your partition ;): mount -t affs /dev/sda4 /mnt/amiga CD to the base tarball's directory and unpack it with: tar xvzpf base2_1.2.0.11.4_1998-10-15.tgz -C /mnt/root The p switch is vital, it sets all permissions correctly. Remove the unconfigured.sh script which would prevent the thing from booting (Note: if you're unlucky and have the first version of rd-deb-install.gz, you will have to use /mnt/root/bin/rm): rm /mnt/root/sbin/unconfigured.sh You need to create /mnt/root/etc/fstab, or else init won't be able to mount the filesystems at boot time. You can use joe to do that: joe /mnt/root/etc/fstab Press CTRL-K and then H for help. CTRL-K X to save the file. FIXME: Unfortunately, there is no template fstab in this base tarball anymore. If you don't know how to set it up, refer to other FAQs (I would be glad if someone could add an example here - or maybe I'll do it sometime :). Now you're set for a first boot into your shiny new &debian; root partition! Remember to unmount all filesystems before rebooting. umount /mnt/root umount /mnt/amiga It should boot right through to the login screen. You must login as root. Now you can start installing additional packages. All the needed stuff like pppd, ftp, etc. is there, so the main problem remaining is probably setting up pppd. Try pppconfig, a tool for that purpose with a User Interface. If that doesn't work, bad luck, check out the PPP-Howto at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/PPP-HOWTO.html Once this works, dselect can download the packages you want automatically via FTP. Just choose FTP as the installation method. The main server is ftp.debian.org, but you'll probably prefer a mirror close to you. Read http://www.debian.org/misc/README.mirrors for a list. There's also a mirror at &sunsite; in /mirrors/ftp.debian.org. The distribution directories are debian/dists/unstable/main and optionally debian/dists/unstable/contrib and debian/dists/unstable/non-free. The location of the non-us files varies from mirror to mirror. You should update the libc and libstdc++ packages ASAP. This may break some packages, just update them to the latest version. E.g. you'll probably have to update the dpkg and tar packages. Congratulations, you should be using &debppc;! ;-) Unfortunately, you can't get X to work with the packages from the official FTP archive. Try the packages Sven built for you in . You need at least the xbase, xbase-clients, xfonts-base, xlib6g, xserver-common, xserver-fbdev and xterm packages. Install them directly with dpkg: dpkg -i <path to the files>x*.deb You also need a window manager; twm in is a very simple one to start, there are lots in the official archive. Some &rhppc; packages don't mix well with &linapus;. Please help me keep this list up to date so people don't have to download useless packages. The kbd* packages messes up the keyboard layout. Do not install them. Supposedly there are &amiga; keyboard patches for the recent kdb packages. I have not tried it myself though. Emacs-nox core dumps. This is a generic problem. The emacs compiled with X libs works fine. Gpm requires a small patch to be working. This is available from (provided by Holger Jakob). The patch is not needed for Gpm version 1.16 and above. You may also have to add MOUSETYPE='BUSMOUSE' to /etc/sysconfig/mouse. X had a bug causing eterm, enlightenment, wmaker, mozilla, etc. to crash when run on afb (i.e., no graphics card). This has been fixed now. Sven has provided a binary of the X server for Debian (may also work for other distributions): http://dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr/~luther/xfree/XF68_FBDev_3.3.4_afb_fix.gz This chapter contains a few random notes on applications for &linapus;. You can get precompiled software for a complete system in both &rh; and &debian; packages (see ). The thing to remember when looking for applications is that &linapus; is binary compatible with &linppc; so you should have no problems finding software. Some commercial applications are also available for &linux;, but only in binary form. You would have to persuade the company to start shipping &cpuppc; compiled binaries in that case. I can imagine some of the other &linppc; sites would be coordinating such efforts, or at least it seems like a good idea to do. In order to run &x; you need to get a version of the &x; server compiled for &cpuppc; with support for the &amiga; hardware. Luckily, such a server is provided by Geert Uytterhoeven at www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/bin/XF68_FBDev-ppc-19981017.gz (You might find a newer version than this). You should also get fbset from Geert's site: www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/bin/fbset-19990118.tar.gz (again, there may be a newer version). This file may also be useful: www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/bin/fb.modes.gz Unzip the &x; server and copy it to /usr/X11R6.3/bin/X. Now get the example XF86Config file from and copy it to /etc/XF86Config. Next, you have to create some &amiga; specific devices which are not included in the &rhppc; packages: cd /dev mknod fb0current c 29 0 mknod amigamouse c 10 4 ln -s fb0current fb0 ln -s amigamouse mouse Now you should be ready to start up &x; by issuing the command "startx". There are a few more details to sort out if you want to run &x; on a graphics card. This text is specific to CyberVision and CyberVision/3D -- but it might help you get &x; running on other cards. Please let me know of your success if you try that. Note: You have to use the same pixel clock under &linapus; as you use under &ados; Text by Jeffrey W. Davis I just wanted to inform everyone that &linapus; and the CV64 is working. I do not have the CV64/3D, but apparently it is also working. From what I have seen for the CV64/3D you need to substitute "virge" for any instance where I mention "cyber". (The frame buffer label "cyber" selects the CyberVision64 driver and "virge" the Cybervision64/3D driver.) I use a simple boot script as follows: copy bootstrap ram:boothack boothack --apus -v -k ram:vmlinux root=/dev/hda3 video=cyber:1024x768-8 Apparently, only resolutions understood by &linux; work at present. Therefore, you should choose 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 in the above statement. I believe all of them have been reported to work. I'm sure that there are others, but I haven't done much experimentation at this point. Make sure that before you boot &linapus;, that your CyberGfx video mode matches what you have selected to boot &linapus;. I believe the two key factors in the command line are the -v and video= options. You should be able to modify the rest to suit your configuration. Once you have successfully booted &linux; you will see the penguin drawing and probably a much higher resolution that what you have seen before. To run &x; you will need to specify the resolution in the /etc/XF86Config file. There is an example in the same directory as where you found Geert Uytterhoeven's &x; server. To figure out what parameters you need, use "fbset -x" You will also find fbset in the, by now, famous directory with Geert Uytterhoeven's &x; server. which will show you what you are currently using. If you are running in an interlaced mode, the fbset program will show you values that your monitor will not actually support. BUT... these values will work properly. Simply LIE about the scanrate in your monitor definition in the XF86Config file. It will work. Use the values returned from fbset and you should be able to start X with no problem. I'd like to see this paragraph rewritten - I wouldn't want someone accidently blowing up their monitor. Users, do be careful! -Jesper If I use the same resolution for everything, with only one resolution specified for X everything works great. Good luck! Really... it works! Text by Jeff Crystal The format for a modeline statement in XF86Config is as follows: modeline NAME Clock HR SH1 SH2 HL VR SV1 SV2 VL where Clock is the pixel clock in Mhz, HR is visible Horizontal resolution, SH1 is the start of the horizontal sync pulse and SH2 is the end, HL is the total Horizontal line length, VR is visible vertical resolution, SV1 and SV2 are the start and end of the sync pulse and VL is the total vertical length. To convert a CGX screen mode to X11, folow these steps. Run CGXMode in prefs Select the video mode that you would like to use and click Edit Compute the values for the modeline statement as follows: Modeline "Name" PC HR HR+HPO HR+HPO+HPL HR+HSL VR VR+VPO VR+VPO+VPL VR+VSL where: PC = Pixel Clock in Mhz (i.e. 40000000Hz is entered as 40) HR = Horizontal Resolution HPO = Horizontal Pulse Offset HPL = Horizontal Pulse Length HSL = Horizontal Sync Length VR = Vertical Resolution VPO = Vertical Pulse Offset VPL = Vertical Pulse Length VSL = Vertical Sync Length Text by Marco De Vitis You have to start &linux; in the screenmode you want to use, through the "video=amifb:pal-lace" or "video=amifb:ntsc-lace" options on the bootstrap command line; you can then start &x; making it use the current screenmode. If you already followed the instruction about running &x; above, the only thing you need to do is edit your /etc/XF86Config file so that the last section "Screen" only contains one "Display" subsection about the "default" mode: SubSection "Display" Modes "default" EndSubsection You can alternatively use Geert Uytterhoeven's XF86Config.pmac file found at www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/bin/XF86Config.pmac.gz decompressing it and copying it in your system as /etc/XF86Config, as it is already set up like that. But you'll probably need to edit it anyway to make it work, changing the line: Device "/dev/adbmouse" to: Device "/dev/mouse" Please note that &x; won't be much usable in 640x400 or even 640x512, and the current (at the time of writing) version of XFree86 doesn't support the "Virtual" option for the "default" mode, but it will do it in the upcoming version 3.3.3, allowing you to have a virtual screen bigger than your actual screensize. Text by Matthias Goerdeler After installing &x; for use with AGA vga-mode (just use the XF86Config found in ) as described earlier I could start &x;, but the monitor just didn't sync. So if your problem is that X does not start, this will probably not help you. I got my monitor to sync after changing the line A to line B in the monitor section of XF86Config: [A] HTimings 640 760 804 916 [B] HTimings 640 750 804 916 It should be pointed out that I do not know how to calculate the correct timing values, it was just 'try and error'. And it is not even sure that this will help you if you run into the same problem as I did. But you could give it a try and report your findings to the linux-apus mailing list. You can also compile many applications yourself as the source code is often freely available. This is likely to be necessary if you want to use an application that is not maintained by either the &rhppc; or &debian; teams, as the application author(s) would probably only supply a precompiled version of the application for the ix86 architecture. Some applications need Linux header files to build. These are normally found in /usr/include in the directories asm and linux. When using &linapus; the header files installed by e.g. &rhppc; should be OK for most applications. However, if you decide to replace the default header files with &linapus; specific header files you must also include the directory /usr/include/asm-m68k which must be either a copy of the linux/include/asm-m68k directory or a link to it. When I get reports of hardware configurations that are known to work with &linapus; I put them in this section. You can match these against your own configuration to get an idea of whether &linapus; will work on your box. Note that things listed here are not necessarily included in the precompiled kernels. In comments are listed the people who reported the information - if you have information about a driver currently not on this list (or conflicting information) please let me know. &cybppc; and &blzppc; boards: A4000/o3o with &cybppc; &cpu604;@150MHz (Jesper Skov). A4000/o4o with &cybppc; &cpu604;@200MHz (Jeffrey W. Davis). A4000/??? with &cybppc; &cpu604;@233MHz (Jens K. Jensen). A1200 with &blzppc; &cpu603;@160MHz (Jouko Pynnonen). A1200 with &blzppc; &cpu603;@200/210MHz (Michel Dänzer). A1200 with &blzppc; &cpu603;@240MHz (Alan Buxey, Sven Luther). A3000T with &cybppc; &cpu604;@233MHz (Francisco Sepulveda). Device Drivers: DISPLAY : AGA display. (Jesper Skov) DISPLAY : CyberVision(/3D). (Sven Ottemann/Jimmy) DISPLAY : Picasso II Clgen. (Francisco Sepulveda) DISPLAY : PM2 (Ilario Nardinocchi) The driver included in the precompiled kernel is an old beta. If you want the up-to-date version get the latest sources from the PM webpage (see ). Don't expect the precompiled version to behave as described on the webpage! FLOPPY : &amiga; floppy disk controller. (Sven Ottemann) IDE : A4000 IDE controller. (Jesper Skov) I/O : &amiga; serial. (Jesper Skov). I/O : &amiga; printer. (Bartek Kozakiewicz) I/O : &gvp; IO extender On some machines, the IO extender may cause the kernel to hang at startup. A crude hack can be used to work around this problem - ask on the mailing list for details if necessary. (Ken Tyler) NET : A2065. (Jesper Skov) NET : Ariadne. (Thomas Lohmann) NET : Ariadne II. There's a performance problem with the driver. It runs at 10% of the speed compared with the &ados; driver. (Martin Koenig) NET : Hydra. (Francisco Sepulveda) NET : SurfSquirrel. (Carlos Mayo) SCSI : A3000/T SCSI controller. (Thomas Haller/Arno Griffioen) SCSI : GVP 11 SCSI controller. (Alex Kazik) SCSI : GVP A2000-HC+8 Series II. (Thomas Lohmann) SCSI : Oktagon 2008 SCSI. (Carsten Pluntke) SCSI : A4091/4000T SCSI controller. You have to disable the use of BATs to map main memory. Add "nobats" to your kernel options. There are still some stability problems with this driver under &linapus;. (Ken Tyler) SCSI : Blizzard/PPC SCSI controller. You have to disable the use of BATs to map main memory. Add "nobats" to your kernel options. (Sven Luther) SOUND : &amiga; DMA sound. (Carsten Plunkte) Software Drivers: FS : affs (Jesper Skov). FS : dos (Sven Ottemann). FS : ext2 (Jesper Skov). FS : hfs (Bartek Kozakiewicz). FS : iso9660 (Bartek Kozakiewicz). FS : joliet (Bartek Kozakiewicz). FS : minix (Jesper Skov). FS : proc (Jesper Skov). FS : vfat (Sven Ottemann). MISC : z2ram (Jesper Skov). RAM : ram disk (initrd) (Jesper Skov). PROTOCOLS: PPP (Carsten Pluntke). There are still plenty of problems with &linapus;. Remember it is a developer kernel, so you cannot expect everything (or anything) to be working. It should get better as time goes by, though. The To Do list below is basically the list of known problems. If you have anything to add to the list, or if any of the listed devices are working for you, please let me know. I work on things as my time permits. I have had bad experiences (plural!) with fixing drivers for devices I don't have myself - it takes too much time and energy, even when someone owning such a device offers to run test kernels. Thus, if you want to see a working driver for your hardware, you really need to start hacking yourself. This is a list of jobs that are up for grabs. If you want to do it and you think it will take more than a couple of days, please let me know so I can mark it to prevent duplicated efforts. (free) Write a driver for the CyberPPC SCSI controller. Jes has started on this (sources available at sunsite.auc.dk//pub/os/linux/680x0/testing/53c770.tar.gz ) but doesn't have the time to work futher on it. NetBSD has a working driver for the controller ( ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/sys/arch/amiga/dev/) but beware of the license issues. There's some developer information at www.lsilogic.com/products/develop.htm. (Thanks to Chris Lawrence for the references). Jes might be able to help with some details on the Phase5 hardware if you want to work on the driver (serious requests only!) (free) If the &ados; ROM is shadowed, it will eat 512kB RAM. It might be possible to disable this shadow mapping, but I don't feel like hacking on it myself - it can be disabled manually in the Early Startup Menu. ( Roman Zippel) Merging the &amiboot; changes. We need someone to maintain the &amiboot; program as Geert Uytterhoeven does not have the time anymore. Presently I have put the &linapus; required changes in . (free) A4000T/A4091 SCSI drivers require the kernel to be compiled using segment registers for memory mapping. Page translations are cached in on-chip translation lookaside buffers (TLBs). When a memory access is attempted and the page information is not found in the TLBs, a table lookup from main memory is required. When the kernel is mapped with BATs, execution of kernel code does not require looking up information about individual pages as the entire kernel memory space is mapped in one chunk. As the kernel memory space used to hold the NCR53c7xx SCSI scripts needs to be mapped as write-through rather than write-back, per-page cache control is required. The current kernel memory system does not mix BAT mappings with segment register mappings, so kernels compiled after 980820 have to use segment register mappings only to ensure that A4091/A4000T drivers work correctly. Two things can be done about this; in the short term, users who use the affected SCSI drivers must use the 'nobats' boot option. A proper long term solution for all users is kernel support for a mixed mapping strategy. Either by mapping the end of kernel space with segment registers and having a special allocator to deal with it, or by re-mapping the required pages with segment registers. The latter strategy is in my opinion better as any overhead will only affect the pages used for the SCSI driver scripts. Unfortunately it will require (minor) driver changes. The former will affect the entire region of memory mapped with segment registers (which will be 1/4 of the available memory - 8-16MB on most systems). I would like to work on this after the machine dependencies have been cleaned up in &linux; 2.3, but I see no reason to spend energy on it in the immediate future (since the drivers are working when using the 'nobats' option). There have been a few suggestions for improving &thisdoc; which require more time than I have at the moment - or I simply don't think it's worth the effort. If you want to write a section please do so in SGML (have a look in faq.sgml to get an idea of what is required). If you can't be bothered to do that, just send plain text and I will set it up in SGML. Do not send me HTML! Again, if you think writing a section will stretch over a couple of days, please let me know so I can fill in your name and prevent wasted effort. (free) A section with boothack example configurations. (suggested by Christophe Decanini) (free) A section with example memory files - I already put in the section but it's empty as no one returned my request for configurations... These might come in handy again since the kernel will eventually support both BAT and SEG mapped memory (since BATs are more efficient). This section should also describe how the memory system works on APUS (shadow mapping, missing 512KB, etc) - this should make it clear why memory files are (well, have) been required. Also how to properly calculate the values of a memory file. Also, more generally, it's important to keep &thisdoc; up-do-date. Here are some areas that need special attention. Please send corrections, or (at least) notify the list about problems. Introduction. First step from ADOS to Linux. Startup instructions. &rh; installation instructions. &debian; installation instructions. File and resource links. Lists of working/broken hardware/drivers. Display options, X startup. There are three "official" ways of reporting problems and getting help. There may exist other news groups or mailing lists dedicated to &cybppc;, &blzppc; and/or &linux;(/APUS) than the ones described in this section. Don't expect any of the developers to read those - reporting problems by any other media than those described in this section is just as likely to be successful as reporting them to your mother (my apologies to any &linapus; hacking mothers out there :) Before reporting a problem, please read the section about etiquette! Mention that you run &linapus; if you are posting a generic &linux; question to the news group. Your problem may be &linapus; specific and you will help other readers realize that if you properly identify the &linux; port you are using. To help others help yourself, always include as much information about the problem as possible. See . Keep your postings in a positive and friendly tone and don't expect the problem to be fixed right away. What is likely to happen is that someone will suggest solutions to your problem: you may be asked to try things you have already attempted (but didn't mention - be very informative!), you may be asked to test special versions of the kernel or the application. It's not guaranteed that your problem will be solved, but with a bit of luck it will be. Above all, be patient, understanding and positive - the developers may be working on other things, helping others with their problems, trying hard to have a life, or simply be clueless about the nature of your problem. Do not send questions like "I cannot boot &linux; on my &amiga;. What's wrong?". You cannot expect anyone to answer such postings, especially because there's no way anyone can be helpful without first making enquiries about your system - save yourself and others the inconvenience: supply as much information as possible. Please don't spam the kernel list or the news group with stories about how poor you think the &linapus; support is, or how the developers lack dedication. The only thing you get out of this is a bad reputation - it doesn't make it easier for us to support devices we don't have. The same goes for failing applications and/or generic kernel problems; if none of the developers are using a particular feature of the kernel or application it is hard to ensure that it is working properly. Again, it's your responsibility to help. Please read existing documentation before posting questions. Even though some helpful person will probably answer a frequently asked question, it's impolite (on your part) to expect others to spend time helping you when you cannot be bothered to take the help people have already offered you in form of FAQs, manuals and previously answered questions. Start by looking in the directory /usr/doc/HOWTO on a &rh; machine which may contain the answers you are looking for. If possible, it's always a good idea to search news group and kernel list archives for a solution to your problem. See the links page (). The Usenet News Group comp.os.linux.m68k is read by many &amiga; users who use &linux;. It's a good place to ask if you have simple questions about &linux; that are specific to the &amiga; (see below for &linapus; questions). You can also ask more generic questions about the use of &linux; even though you would probably be better off posting to groups with more traffic and readers. Remember, &linux; is available on many platforms - an application problem you have is likely also to be a problem for, say, an ix86 (Intel) user. And there are tons of help to be found in FAQs, HOWTOs and general &linux; documentation (see ). If you are new to &linux; you might even consider buying a book about &linux; usage - this is one of the things that sets &linux; apart from &ados;; there are so many users that there's commercial interest in supporting it (with books and hot-line help). If you have a problem that is specific to the &linapus; installation, use of specific &linapus; packages, or if you think you have found a problem with the &linapus; kernel (i.e., a driver problem or a generic kernel problem), you should mail to the &linapus; kernel mailing list. You should describe how to repeat the problem. It's very hard to debug something that cannot be seen. Some problems are periodic or occur at random times in different applications, which is not easy to repeat. In this case, include whatever information you have in the posting. You can follow the traffic on the kernel list via the news gateway at news://sunsite.auc.dk/sunsite.linux.apus. It's fast and your mail box is not overburdened. You can also join the list (send mail to linux-apus-help@sunsite.auc.dk). You can post to the list at the address linux-apus@sunsite.auc.dk. This is not the place to ask for help. This address's usage should be restricted to sending the maintainer FAQ submissions. Everything else should be posted to the kernel list which has a wider audience. At the &linm68k; domain &linapus; has kindly been given an email alias apus@linux-m68k.org. This will forward mails to whoever is maintaining &thisdoc; (at the moment me, Jesper Skov). In this chapter you will find a list of frequently asked questions. If you don't find the answer to your question, please read . How come my questions are not answered? Perhaps nobody knows the answer, or the question is not directly related to &linapus;. If the same problem is reproducible under &linm68k; you would be better of asking in a &linm68k; forum. If you don't experience the problem under &linm68k; it is likely to be &linapus; specific; please include this information when you post to the &linapus; kernel list. Even though this doesn't improve the chances of getting the problem fixed, the problem can be mentioned in &thisdoc; so others will be aware of it. Your question could already be answered somewhere in &thisdoc; and nobody can be bothered to tell you this. Help yourself; read the entire document - it is not that big. It is also a good idea to search for the answer to your question in the &linapus; kernel list archive. If you find answers to your questions in unexpected parts of this document or in the kernel list archive, please let me know so I can update &thisdoc; for the benefit of the next user with the same problem. Are there any &ados; requirements? Yes. Even though the &linux; kernel in itself does not use &ados;, booting the kernel relies on &p5;'s &cpuppc; micro kernel. Is &linapus; binary compatible with the other &cpuppc; &linux; ports? Yes. You can (AFAIK) use most software packages precompiled for &linppc;. Some noteworthy exceptions are: the X server (see below) and &amiga; or &linapus; specific tools which you are not likely to find available from normal &linppc; sites. How come not all &linm68k; supported devices can be selected when configuring? Because &linux; configuring at the moment is architecture dependent. You have to move items from arch/m68k/config.in into arch/ppc/config.in or (even better) into the Config.in in a driver directory. If you do, please post the diff on the kernel list. Are &cybppc; developer boards supported? Not at the moment - and they are not likely to be supported any time soon; moving the &cpum68k; CPU from one board to another is hell and I hate fiddling with the guts of my box. But if you have such a beast, by all means, start porting - I can give you some pointers. Is Netscape available? Yes. And it's even working (according to Jens Kristian Jensen). Is the &cpum68k; CPU used for anything? No. It is put to sleep (stop #2700) during boot. This may change sometime in the future. I guess it could be used as a gfx coprocessor, for clearing empty pages, or even for running native &cpum68k; programs under special conditions (like AROS). Will it ever be possible to use a mixed set of &cpum68k; and &cpuppc; executables? Not likely. This would require a shared memory mapping. However, nothing is impossible - you go ahead! I can't boot from the ram disk with 2.1.90 kernels!?! There's some problem with identifying MINIX headers in 2.1.90. Use gzip to compress the ram disk and it will work. Does &linapus; support kernel debugging with &gdb;? The kernel diff contains the necessary stubs and config flag (CONFIG_KGDB) to do this (originally for PMAC, written by Mike Tesch). A debug kernel is around 10MB though so I will not upload a precompiled kernel with debugging. I have still not tested this so your mileage may vary. When I recompile the kernel using your patches, I get disk failures and runtime errors!?! Use binutils-2.9.1 and egcs-1.1. Get the 980525 kernel sources or newer and you should be OK. Why not use LPSTOP to halt the CPU on &cpu060; systems? It hangs the system. Possibly because the &cybppc; bus design cannot cope with the signals the &cpu060; sends out before powering down. I cannot mount all my partitions. There are not enough dev nodes in the ram disk!?! I have put mknod compiled for &cpuppc; in . Put it on an &ados; partition you can mount, boot the kernel, mount the &ados; partition, use mknod to make new nodes. My system just hangs when I start &boothack;!?? It might be a problem with &boothack;. Try rebooting the machine and run the tool bootmesg. It should find a progress string from the booter. This string is deleted by the kernel if it boots, so if the string is not found, it's probably a kernel problem (and you should use debug=mem and &dmesg; instead). The last character stored before jumping to the kernel is 'K'. If you see a string, and the last letter is not 'K', you can look in the ppc_boot.c code to get an idea of where things go wrong. Please also report your findings. Another thing that is likely to cause this problem is memory. See for some more information on this point. Yet another common cause is wrong video mode parameters. 'vga' has caused problems, while specifying none (if your monitor can handle it) definitely works. If you have a CyberVision you have to let it be initialized by CyberGfx before you boot. You must also disable Shadow ROM in the &cybppc; or &blzppc; Early Startup Menu and set the memory speed to 70ns. Finally, make sure to put &boothack; options (starts with a dash (-)) first on the line and kernel options (no dash) last on the line when booting the kernel. Can I boot from a soft kicked system? Possibly. You might be able to make it work. Do try it. If it doesn't work you have to disable the soft kicked ROM. You might also try booting your machine without startup-sequence, run setpatch and then start &linapus; (unless you have a CyberVision in which case you must let CyberGfx initialize it first). Can I compile my own kernels under &linapus;? Yes. I have successfully run a kernel I build with binutils-2.9.1 and egcs-1.1 on my &linapus; box. However, YMMV. I get rejects when applying your patch!!?? My patches are relative to the release versions of the &linm68k; kernel sources (not Linus' kernel sources!). If you apply &linm68k; patches from the &linm68k; kernel list before you apply my patches, you may get conflicts. I cannot boot &linapus; on my &blzppc;!!? Hint from Sinan Gurkan The later firmware versions make the hardware identify itself as if it had a SCSI controller - even the boards with no SCSI controller! Until the problem gets properly fixed, you can press s during boot to disable the (non-existing) SCSI hardware :) How do I boot with AGA display on a machine with CyberVision(/3D)? You need to disable the frame buffer device assigned to the graphics card by adding (one of) the below to the boot options. video=cyber:off video=virge:off How do I change the default keymap? Text by Marco De Vitis Let's assume you already have a keymap file that suits your system, e.g. amiga-it.map for an Italian Amiga keyboard (you can find many keymap files at ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/Linux/680x0/bin/system/keymaps/). Put this file in the /usr/lib/kbd/keytables directory. You should now be able to load it by issuing this command: loadkeys amiga-it.map To have it loaded during boot (on &rhppc;), you have to edit the /etc/sysconfig/keyboard file so that it contains the full path to your keymap; by default, it should read something like "/usr/lib/kbd/keytables/amiga-us.map", so you usually only need to change the ending. How come the sound driver is not included in the prebuilt kernels? Because it doesn't like the heartbeat (which affects the filter when blinking the led). Heartbeat is important for determining if &linapus; has properly booted even if the display is blank, i.e., it is relevant in a kernel that a novice will boot for the first time. And it means I don't have to switch display each time I boot a kernel ;) If you worry about sound support, it means you have a stable system -- and that means that you should be able to rebuild the kernel yourself. Why can't the mailing list...? It's not by accident that the list server is set up as it is -- this is the way the guys in power like it :) See below for some workarounds. SUBJECT LINE: If you want [APUS] or similar in the subject line, it's probably because you want to sort/filter your mail by subject. In that case, your mailer should be able to sort/filter by any other header line. A good one is: Mailing-List: contact linux-apus-help@sunsite.auc.dk; run by ezmlm REPLY-TO: Yes, you 'reply' to the author of the article. We are all real living people -- if you want to reply to something it's because you want to say something to the dude at the other end of the damp string, no? :) Polite people mostly CC: the list so others can benefit from the reply as well. So, use 'followup' instead of 'reply'. Yes, the receiver gets two copies; that is The-Way-It-Should-Be(TM). Where can i find information about the unix command line syntax? There are a lot of HOWTO's available at the Linux Documentation Project, available at : http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/. One in particular is useful for first timer, altough it is more oriented to msdos upgraders, it is the "DOS/Win to Linux HOWTO", available at : http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.html Notice : these howtos can be found in the following debian packages : doc/doc-linux-text_xxx.deb for the text version doc/doc-linux-html_xxx.deb for the html version. There are also lots of translation packages : doc/doc-linux-fr_xxx.deb for example for the french version. X isn't working right The linuxppc X packages (unlike &debian;) install only a Pmac X server (XPmac), just get the one from Geert's site, and copy it in /usr/X11R6/bin, and change the X symlink with : prompt> rm X prompt> ln -s XF68_FBDev X Also see . The console is flashing See . How to get an pm2 accelerated X server for &debian;? get the XF68_FBDev_pm2_4 or later file from http://dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr/~luther/xfree/ and copy it to your /usr/X11R6/bin directory. Check the readme files on the web site to see what each of those XF68_FBdev_pm2 files contain. Then you need to edit /etc/X11/Xserver, and change the first line to be the absolute path to the Xserver (should be /usr/X11R6/bin/XF68_FBDev_pm2_4 in our case, but you can put it anywhere you want, or rename it to your liking). There are various Xserver in the above dir, some contains GC acceleration, very fast but still some graphical problems, other have GC acceleration disabled. It is up to you to choose which one you want. Read the readme file to check. Notice : this patch will be in the nect release of Xfree 3.3.4, so you will not need to do this then. I like to follow the progress of the stuff I use, so I decided to keep track of &linapus; changes so others with the same interest can get an idea of what's happening. I also keep source code ChangeLogs (ChangeLog-22x and ChangeLog-23x) for the &linapus; changes which are available from . Please note that some of the entries may only apply to one of the kernel trees. If in doubt, check the 22x and 23x ChangeLogs for details. date991030 991030 Added notes about MUI installer from Duncan Gibb 990821 Added link to R5 installation guide. Updated stable and developer sources. 990703 Updated the FAQ with text from Sven Luther and Douglas Valentine. More hypercom updates from Gordon Huby. Sound and heartbeat patch from Chris Lawrence 990605 Added A1200 HyperCOM1 serial driver from Gordon Huby. 990602 Added keyboard fix from Jeff Crystal/Geert Uytterhoeven. 990530 Fixed some broken APUS links (thanks Douglas). Re-organized this document a bit. Made a new stable branch. 990523 Added a new paragraph about kernel sources/diffs. (suggested by Douglas Valentine) Added a new FAQ entry from Sven Luther. 990516 Source release only - serious changes and known keyboard problem. Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.8. Merged in a few vger changes. apus_setup.c needs a major overhaul, but now the framework is there to do a proper job of it... Applied fixes from Chris Lawrence and Jouko Pynnonen. 990504 Fixed a few broken links (thanks, Geert). Added some stuff to /proc/cpuinfo so an &linapus; system can be recognized by the installer. 990502 Added new section about X and CyberGfx stuff from Jeff Crystal. 990421 Added __lshrdi3 patch from Gabriel Paubert (paubert@iram.es) (from ppc kernel list). Added mb() to ser_ioext in an attemt to work around a problem found by Peter Kaltstein (CyberStrike@studbox.uni-stuttgart.de). 990403 Named the files of this document so you can now add bookmarks that will work. Added the PCMCIA WHIPPET & APNE drivers. Mecha Ike deserves credits for almost beating me to it :) 990323 Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.3pre1. 990322 Added mb() fix for A2091 driver from Jes. 990321 Added yet another info item for GPM, this time from Gerard Cornu. ChangeLog now available from this document. Incremental change logs included in the linux-apus-YYMMDD.diff diffs as a comment. 990301 Ken Tyler sends me a virge blitter fix as a birthday present ;) 990221 Arno Griffioen takes matters in his own hands and fixes DMA on the A3000 SCSI controller :) I added the same DMA patches to the A2091 and GVP11 drivers. 990220 Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.1pre2. Cleaned up serial driver and GDB support. 990214 Added gpm note from Robert Ramiega. 990206 Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.1pre1. Removed parallel/printer drivers. The new driver scheme seems to hang the kernel and I don't have the time to track it down now. 990203 Updated &thisdoc; to compile with DocBook 3.0 990201 Debian install help updated (Michel Dänzer) Added Virge Z2 support from (Christian T. Steigies). 990131 NO_RELOAD_TAB fix from Michel Dänzer. Cleaned up APUS: output during boot. 990129 Virge update from Ken Tyler. Other video updates from Geert Uytterhoeven. 990123 Module fix from Andreas Schwab. Menuconfig and module fix from Michel Dänzer). Rewrote part of the interrupt handling. Lvl7 interrupts cannot be avoided, but they are now treated as the bogus Lvl0 interrupts. 990118 Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.0pre7. Replaced the obsolete cvppc driver with the pm2 driver (Ilario Nardinocchi). Fix BlizzardPPC SCSI's dependencies (Michel Dänzer). Replaced iobarrier() with mb(). 990113 Added fix for building lp as module from Frank Petzold. Removed FastLane from list of working hardware and from the precompiled kernels. 990112 Added &debian; installation section by Michel Dänzer. 990111 Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.0pre6. There might be problems with memory mapping devices. If you experience problems, try using the nobats option. 990106 Added PowerUp PCI Bridge detection to boothack. Contributed by Ralph Schmidt. 990105 Updated to &linm68k; 2.2.0pre4. Light my fire, baby! It's smoooking fast :@) &x; starts in no time now... I need to get this kernel installed on Concubine! Changed installer directory structure on &sunsite; in preparation for proper support of &debian; installation schemes. Martin Koenig sez the Ariadne II driver is working (somewhat slow though). Carlos Mayo sez the SurfSquirrel is working. (PCMCIA card, right?). Updated &thisdoc; here and there. If I missed anything during the past couple of weeks, please let me know. 981216 Updated to &linm68k; 2.1.131. 981213 Added patch from Richard Hirst to fix CDROM mount problem on A4000T/A4091 SCSI. Changed CONFIG_PPC in sound driver to CONFIG_PMAC. I'd like to know if it solves the problems. 981129 Added a handful of patches from Chris Lawrence. 981127 Updated to 2.1.130 Fixed off-by-1 error in reloc code. This is what stopped some people from running the later kernels, I'm sure. Added a (good) handful of iobarriers to the MFC serial driver. It might have fixed the reported problem. 981126 The latest directory now contains files (not links) with dated names to prevent confusion in the future. If people try to download using a cached and obsolete name, they should get an error. Reintroduced the head.S progress values. 981125 Included Whippet driver. I got a patch from Carlos Mayo some time ago, but it was already included in 2.1.127. Changed a few bits of the new relocation magic per suggestion from Paul Mackerras. I can't imagine it will help on the failing boxes but one never knows. Added new sections by Marco (FAQ) and Matthias (X). 981122 Added some &debppc; links from Sven Luther Updated list of included drivers. The vger integration is pretty much done now. Reports of 981121 failing to boot. *sigh* If you can get it to boot, use an older kernel. 981121 Added X help text from Marco De Vitis. Good progress on the major &linapus; workover and vger integration. It's now close to being possible to boot a &linapus; kernel on any of the other PPC targets. Do I need to point out that this is a Good Thing(TM) for distributions? :) Still a few nits to sort out though. &boothack; needed a modification to allow the above changes so you need to get that as well. It is backwards compatible, so you can still use it with the older kernels. Included pretty much all drivers in the kernel image (and Mac FS and partition table support). 981117 Worked on vger integration. 981114 Renamed iobarrier macros. Updated CyberVision driver. Might have broken it, please let me know. Cleaned up links (see ). 981112 Replaced auxmem with a simpler hack. Even though auxmem would have been pretty compared with the random hacking of Z2 and motherboard memory now used, it would also have been overkill. Updated to 2.1.127. 981108 Added section about installing from a &rhrc; CD. Included Ilario's CVPPC frame buffer device. See the home page for details on use (). 981107 Sync'd with vger again. Mainly to get some &linapus; changes into the &linux; main tree. Juiced up my motivation (nice meeting you, Ken & Julian :) Fixed stupid bug in mm_ptov. Found by Ilario. Redid the fb X fix, avoiding ptov calls. 981105 Added '60nsram' kernel option. Added 'nobats' kernel option. Improved memory mapping; should use BATs correctly, even on &blzppc; cards with weird alignment. 981103 Added patch from Peter McGavin to fix EGS. Added patch from Frank Petzold to fix modules. Worked a bit more on &thisdoc; 981102 Sync'd PPC stuff with vger. Proper fix to the X problem. Started rearranging &thisdoc; into two parts. 981031 Added IDEDOUBLER fix from Geert Uytterhoeven. Added X fix from Carsten. Added some installer doc changes from Ken Tyler. 981018 Sven found the problem preventing proper operation on Blizzard. It was as suspected all along related to the new (soon obsolete :) booting process. I have started using egcs-1.1 for building kernels. They seem to work fine on my box. I'd like to hear from you ASAP if they don't work on your box. I don't know if the patches are necessary for egcs-1.1. I guess time will tell. (Remember; if parts of the patch seems to be missing in egcs-1.1 it doesn't necessary mean that the problem the patch fixed in 1.0.3 hasn't been fixed in some other way.) Included the serial driver again. 981014 Added &rh; install updates from Ken Tyler to &thisdoc; 981009 Updated to 2.1.124 (X is still broken). 981005 Included Fastlane SCSI driver. 981004 Wasted some more time on KGDB. It's still not good, but it's better. Added heartbeat. 981003 Made KGDB work (still some problems to sort out, but it is usable). Added workaround for ioremap bug. You can now use motherboard/Z2 memory for swap (see relevant FAQ entry). Added compiler option (-fno-strength-reduce) that may (or may not) affect the A4000T/A4091 SCSI drivers. 981002 Added some more changes to the &rh; installer sections from Ken Tyler. 980926 Included some changes to the &rh; installer sections from Ken Tyler. Added new FAQ entry from Ken Tyler (disabling CV to boot on AGA). Added new section with suggestions for &thisdoc; Christophe Decanini reports that RH CDROM, FTP and NFS installation methods work. 980915 Added Geert Uytterhoeven's patch to allow 1024x768-16bp with CyberVision. 980912 Undid the first change of 980907 since it made the kernel fail to boot on most other machines. 980908 Updated to 2.1.120. 980907 Only 128kB is eaten by the PPC exception registers now, leaving 384kB more free memory than before. Added a simple and not yet fully functional method for using motherboard memory as swap. See new FAQ entry. 980902 Submitted patch to vger (well, to Geert, really :) Added code to determine bus speed written by Ralph Schmidt. 980901 Added latest vger PPC changes. The above bloated the kernel so much that a linker/booter problem prevented it from booting. I removed the Retina and clGen graphics drivers because of this. 980831 It's now possible to disable wait states for all bus speeds. Sven Ottemann has been pushing for this for some time, but let me warn you; you need 60ns RAM, and according to Phase5 it doesn't work on 66MHz buses. YMMV. Now the bus speed ID is output at startup to help debugging. 980830 Sven Ottemann fixed the booter to be a one-file image, rather than the old ADOSHUNK/ELF pair. Made the booter clear all MMU registers. head.S now sets up all the required mappings - which makes the &blzppc; get past the old trouble spot. There are still some problems left though. Reintroduced colors to &thisdoc;, marking new stuff. The chapters and sections are appended with a date where appropriate so you can see where the latest changes are from the table of contents. 980829 Updated to &linux; 2.1.119. 980827 Fixed a potential problem in head.S. &blzppc; owners should give it a try. 980822 Ken Tyler informs me that the A4091/A4000T SCSI driver is finally working. This is due to the fabulous work of Richard Hirst. Still, this has resulted in an item on the to do list (performance penalty). I have put my sources under CVS control so in the future I will be able to release incremental diffs of the &linapus; sources. 980821 Francisco also reports that the Hydra driver is working. &blzppc; owners should check the FAQ entry specific to their HW. I just added a suggestion from Sven Luther. 980820 Francisco Sepulveda informs me that the Picasso driver is working on his A3000T. Added patch to menubox.c from Frank Petzold. Changed kernel to use segment registers for mapping kernel space. This might fix the A4000T/A4091 driver problem (even though I'm tired of being enthusiastic about that :) 980816 Completed move of &thisdoc; to DocBook. That took some time! I wonder if anyone will miss the color highlighting of changes to the document? If so, let me know and I will get it working again. Added some changes from &linppc; 980813 Included &blzppc; SCSI driver again. Included Buddha IDE driver. Included patch to socket.h 980812 Included clgen gfx driver. More additions to the A4091 support. Updated to linux-2.1.115 980801 Unfortunately the new &boothack; still can't boot &linapus; properly on &blzppc; - possibly a problem with the 040. I'd like to hear from &cybppc; people who can boot on an 040. Added a few syncs and eieios to the booter. Added Sven's Blizzard SCSI patches. The kernel image in vmbl980801.lzh includes this driver and a not the Gayle IDE driver which conflicts with the SCSI driver for some reason. 980730 &boothack;: Added more robust synchronization between the CPUs (the "wedgie" scheme). &boothack;: Added stack space for &cpuppc; in CHIP. &boothack;: Invalidate cache contents. &boothack;: Disable TimerBase interrupts (this is the one that won the gold). The above ensures rock-stable booting on my box with the 980711 ppc.library. No more bad checksums; it's just awesome :) 980726-2 Updated my ppc.library to 980711. I now know what the problem has been on the &blzppc; cards - I think :) Moved head.S progress word to 0xfff0eff0. Added some text about how to avoid memory problems when booting (Please do read it and tell me if it is of any help, or if it requires changes/additions). Added checksum code to the booter. 980726 Fixed the problem with zorro devices count. Fixed memory initialization code again. 980725 Fixed silly bug in an A4091/A4000T SCSI driver support routine which caused kernel panics. Thomas Lohmann informs me that Ken&Son's &rhinstaller; works with FTP. Added new contrib directory at &sunsite; (see ). Memory initialization should now correctly identify an active &ados; ROM shadow and ignore that 512kB block of memory. 980724 Changed date format to YYMMDD. Fixed problem with Zorro structures (get newest &boothack;). 980723 Apparently lots of stuff is broken in 2.1.108: CyberVision, GVP HC+8, you name it. I'm clueless. Nothing really changed on the &linapus; side of things, so I must have missed some serious &linm68k; changes. Thomas Lohmann informs me that CV works with the console in all resolutions after he installed the ppc.library included in cybergfx of 05.07.98 (IIRC). I tried including sound in the kernel, but there is a build problem. I have made some changes to the A4091/A4000T driver support that might make a difference. 980719 Added Richard Hirst's 53c710 patch. 980711 Moved patches to 2.1.108. Added a few FAQ changes suggested by Thomas Lohmann. He also told me that the GVP A2000-HC+8 Series II SCSI controller is working with &linapus;. 980710 Increased SCSI timeouts. Tested &linapus; startup with ppc.library version 46.15 and 68060.library version 44.3. No problems whatsoever on my box. 980707