Re: Serious problems on DS20

[Brad Lucier <lucier math purdue edu>]

Thank you for all the help with my DS20 clone.  It has been up and stable
now for almost a week, under relatively heavy load, and maybe all the
serious bugs have been wrung out of it.

To return something to this list before I unsubscribe and peruse it on
the archive sites, I'd like to add what I learned about how to install
RH 6.0 on this machine (much of which is in the documentation, but some
of which contradicts the documentation):

0.  Use the on-board SCSI Adaptec controllers for the install, rather than
    the NCR contollers; the kernels/generic.gz kernel on the RH 6.0 CD
    has timing problems with the NCR controllers I have.
1.  Use fdisk to partition the disk.
2.  Use a bsd disk label ("b" in fdisk).
3.  Leave the first cylinder free for the boot block.
4.  Do not allocate more cylinders to the last partition than are really
    on the disk, even if fdisk suggests you do.
5.  Do not allocate partition c to the whole disk (even though it says to
    do so in the RH documentation, it wouldn't work like this).
6.  Remember, after installing the RPMs, to write the booter to the boot block.
7.  Install more recent binutils than are on the RH 6.0 CD, especially if
    you use -mieee and the gcc-2.95.1 compiler.  (gcc-2.95 has a
    code generation bug for IEEE floating-point code with -mcpu=ev6.)  I
    suggest the 2.9.5.0.* series maintained by H. J. Lu at
    ftp://ftp.varesearch.com/pub/support/hjl
    (although there are still some 64bit bugs in the latest code that should
    be fixed in 2.9.5.0.17 when that comes out)
7.  Install a relatively recent kernel (I couldn't get the kernels before
    2.2.13 to work reliably, specifically, I had problems with 2.2.5 shipped on
    the RH CD, 2.2.11, and 2.2.12). (Other people suggest using a relatively
    old 2.2 kernel; YMMV.)
8.  Install all RH updated RPMs (although the kde updates won't install
    because of a missing library, but I don't use kde on that machine).
9.  Before running out of real memory and having to use virtual memory,
    switch from the Adaptec controllers to the NCR contollers so you don't
    trash your hard disk.

Ugh.  It is relatively painful to recall what has been needed so far to
get this machine working correctly.  But the fdisk suggestion seems to have
fixed the last big problem.

Brad Lucier