pw 500au problems

[Harold Lind zool AirTouch COM]

Harold Lind@AIRTOUCH
05/28/98 05:08 PM

Hi,

I have been struggling with getting linux up on the 500au.  I have
successfully done the install.  Many thanks to Jay Estabrook and Stephen
Bruce for their guidence on this.  What finally worked for me was:

use noritake-2030-srm-ev5-07nov.img to rawrite kernel boot disk.

replace vmlinux.gz on kernel disk with MIATA-s-test-pre34-11b.gz

make ramdisk with image from 5.0 of redhat.

>>> boot dva0 -file vmlinux.gz -fl "load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1
root=/dev/fd0"

Then we did a local cdrom install of 5.0

Some problems we ran into:

Initially tried to use a narrow scsi disk on a fast wide controller with 3
other fast wide disks.  Although other operating systems didn't seem to
have a problem with this (like vms), the scsi probe would not work in
linux.  We got an error 4005.  We assume that it was attempting to spin up
the disk.  We continued to loop doing the probe.  After turning off the
disk, we could continue, but since this was the disk I was going to install
linux on, we were hosed.  The fix was to copy vms from one of the fast wide
disks to the narrow disk and install linux on the fast wide disk.  Anyone
have any ideas on this ? (besides "don't hook a narrow drive to a fast wide
interface).

Our eth0 is not working (tulip).  Any ideas on this ?

SuperProbe correctly identifies our graphics card as cirrus logic 5424, but
when doing startx, we get the message: "(--) SVGA: PCI: Digital Unknown
chipset (0x000d) rev 34, Memory @ 0x10000000"

none of the configured devices were detected.

Anyone seen this ?

I also have another question.  After the installation, we still have to
boot from the kernel floppy.  It seems that since the main hard drive
(sdc1) is an ext2 file system the same as the floppy, I would think we
should be able to boot directly from the hard disk.  The boot blocks could
be written out, we would load and execute aboot and then unzip vmlinux.gz ?
The boot command could then be something like:

>>> b dkc400 -file vmlinux.gz -fl "root=/dev/sdc1"

There must be something more to it, or it would already be done, but I am
wondering what ?  Any ideas ?

thanks in advance,

Harold M. Lind
Principal Software Engineer
AirTouch Cellular
Irvine, CA USA