Re: Upgrading from 2.2.8 to 2.4.9 and upgrading in general

[Andreas <an...@po...>]

Hi Adam

>> Please also think about contact problems, especially regarding the SIMMS
> on the
>> CSPPC, if you are experiencing random crashes. As it looks, we have quite
> a similar
>> configuration with several harddrives and cd-roms. Have you ever thought
> about
>> purchasing those special harddisk coolers with two fans, which supply the
>> harddrives with cool air out of the 5 1/4" slots? They are quite useful,
> earlier
>> my tower has always been very hot around the drives, nowadays they stay
> cool.
>> 
>> How does your system behave under AmigaOS?
>> 
> My system behaves pretty stable under AmigaOS, but if I have heat problems
> the machine will reboot and not get past the first use of a PPC datatype.  I
> know for a fact that I have one SIMM slot that makes poor contact on the
> first pin closest to the CPU's.  I've removed the SIMMS from this slot and
> it's twin and have had the same problems.

OK, that's bad. Look out for more/better fans.

[ bad sectors ]

>> Hmm, don't know about this. Did you do bad sector checking during
>> installation? Maybe you switch this one of. Hmm, I thought bad sector
> checking
>> would only be useful with older disk, which haven't their own bad sector
>> management, or am I wrong with this?
>> 
>> Are you using a whole harddisk for Linux?
>> 
> I've got two harddrives with the first one having an AFFS partition to move
> kernels around.  The second drive is the one with the bad sectors.  The
> LinuxPPC 2000 installler works fine if you don't check off finding the bad
> blocks.  Normally I do a two pass intall.  First to do the formatting, and
> second to to the install.

That's a also an idea ;)

>>> Based on your email, I've just tried the YDL 2.1 distribution with no
> luck
>>> since it tries to mount /proc/usb and fails and a message comes back
> that "I
>>> can't recover from this."  This is with the 2.4.9 kernel.  Although I
> did
>>> learn how to adjust the ramdisk size by using ramdisk_size = 16384.  If
> it
>>> were easy I guess it wouldn't be any fun, eh?

Hmm, well no, I personally think it's more fun if you wouldn't experience that much
problems. Maybe it's useful to have some problems when the first time
installing a Linux system, because like that you have the possibility to learn
some important and interesting basics, which can be useful in daily admin
life, which others don't know about because they had a smooth and fearless
installation...

>> Hmm, once had a YDL kind of distro on my machine, but it was a selfmade
>> mixture between LinuxPPC and YDL, and it was quite a long ago.. Don't even
>> remember if it was a fresh install or an update..
>> 
> 
> I've been using YDL 2.1 on my MAC and it seems pretty stable.  It would have
> been convenient to have it work but I'll try SuSE 7.1

Hmm, better use SuSE 7.3 if you have it at disposition, because 7.1 has some
really painful issues. For example, the GNOME midnight commander gmc won't work, and
it seems as it isn't even an Linux/APUS problem, but a real bad version on the
SuSE CD's, gmc didn't even work on my G4 PowerBook.

Please also be aware of some more caveats. It isn't possible (at least with
7.1) to use a harddisk which is shared with non Linux-Partitions in an Amiga
(well, if you give it a whole harddisk you'll of course not be affected),
because the SuSE partitioning tool doesn't recognise the Amiga partitioning
scheme. But installation is quite straight forward, just select "whole
harddisk" or something, and you don't have to worry anymore about
partitioning. So you don't have to partition and set identifiers under
AmigaOS anymore.

Another issue is that it won't work with APUS precompiled kernel 2.2.10 AFAIR,
because this kernel has not DOS partitioning scheme support compiled in it, and that's
what SuSE does with your harddisk, it will install a DOS partition table. You
have to use 2.4.9 I think. Just copy the ramdisk.image.gz (I think it's called
like this on the CD's, I don't remember if I renamed it after copying, but you
can determine it easy by looking for a file in the size of about 610008 bytes
[version 7.1]
on the CD's, somewhere in a install directory) from the SuSE CD set (I can't
remember if it has been on CD no. 1, but I guess it was) to your Amiga disk
where you have bootstrap and the start script. If you have problems
determining the ramdisk.image file I could also send it to you if you wish
that (although I don't know about copyright issues, and only version 7.1).

-- 
All the best,
Andi