Re: Woody

[Daniel P. <cor...@ho...>]

I have a complete newbie APUS woody install guide in the works ... its being 
held back by some other things i have to do.

Although if you've managed to install debian before you should be ok , if 
you look on your woody cd one in dists / woody / binarypowerpc / disks/ apus 
or something along those lines there is the boothack and ramdisks and some 
unhelpful launch scripts . basically you need to boot the root.bin ramdisk 
from the debian cd like you did with the ramdisk images for an earlier 
version. That ramdisk contains the debian 3 installer which is pretty easy 
going .. but you can miss out the install kernel and os modules option as 
its usless and doesn't work.

heres what i have of the guide so far , it probaly contains lots of spelling 
mistakes and is in no way complete or greatly detailed , but if it helps :) 
, as you can see i write the start and end of things at the same time , so 
the part about getting the installation going is missing almost completly 
... but you should be able to work it out from what i've said above/.

---> Guide start
1. What do I need ? : The most important thing your going to need for this 
guide is a source to install debian from , these include:

CD-ROMs
FTP/HTTP
NFS share on another machine.
A local harddisk partition.

In this guide i will be using my Debian 3 (woody) CD , but it should be 
quite easy to apply this guide to other sources. You can find out how to get 
the ISO of the CD to burn in one of the apendixes. Ok , so we have a source 
to install our debian base system from what else do we need :

An APUS PPC Kernel
An APUS Boothack
A Debian installer ram disk image.

All these are supplied on the debain CD-ROM in ( insert path here ) and can 
also be found on the debain FTP / HTTP and the APUS source forge site. Now 
we've got all the software side of things its on to the hardware :

Blizzard/Cyberstorm PPC card
32+ Ram for serious usage , 16 should be ok for Console.
An AmigaOS install to launch the boothack from
1 (minimum , you can have more ) linux partition for the root and 1 linux 
swap partition
A supported amiga graphics card is also very useful , but you can ofcourse 
use chipset graphics.

You shouldn't worry about creating the Linux partitions at this point , 
we'll do them in the Debian Installer.

TIP : Try if you can to get a fresh harddrive for linux to keep your normal 
amigaOs install and it far away from each other , this way your less likely 
to wipe your amigaOS side of things or upset the APUS boothack, once the 
system is setup and running you should be ok to put the amigaOs drive back 
in and dual boot so to speak.

2. Whats next ? :

At this point if your using a fresh drive e.g. no partitions you will need 
to boot your harddrive / amigaOs install disk ( install 3.0/3,1 ) , most 
people should have got these if they bought an harddrive in the old days or 
with their machine, if you don't you have one you will need to boot your 
main AmigaOs installation with the new drive connected and use HDTool box 
from there.

Basically you need to :

Create a small amigaOs partition at the begining of the disk, 100 meg should 
do it and have enough space to play with kernels etc . and then install 
amigaOs 3.0 or 3.1 on it , we could use 3.5 or 3.9 but if we're using a 
clean harddrive we should really make sure we keep amigaOs minimal so as not 
to cause trouble with the boothack etc. Leave the rest of the disk clear , 
we will create linux partitions there in the debian installer later.

You can install AmigaOs from disks on to the new partition using the install 
disk , or if you have the os 3.5 cd you can use the os3.1 package from there 
and install 3.1 on the new drive while you are in you normal amiga os 
installation , just make sure you select the location to install it to else 
it will overwrite your system drive.

At this point you need to get the boothack , kernel and ramdisk over to your 
amigaOS install be it a new install or your main working install. If your 
doing this from a new install you will probaly need to boot you main install 
and copy the files from your debian CD to the new drive , the files you need 
are :

I used a completly new drive with just an Os3.1 install , so i needed to 
install Ide-Fix from its floppy disk to get access to the debian CD-Rom ( I 
also downloaded kernels and boothacks from the APUS site but that is out of 
the scope of this guide ) . Within linux you will not need any external 
amigaOs drivers , so it is not nessarcy to install all your amigaOs kit here 
.. You want to keep it as clean as possible,

BlizzardPPC owners shouldn't need to install a PPC.library or WarpOS ( Both 
are supported ) as they have a PPC.Library in ROM , CyberStorms i don't know 
about as i don't have one , but if in doubt install the PPC.library from the 
DCE site ( www.dcecom.de ) .

3. Getting the installation going

bootstrap --apus "kernel options"


bootstrap --apus -k apus/linux -r apus/images-1.44/root.bin root=/dev/ram

bootstrap --apus -k apus/linux root=/dev/sda3

The first thing the installer will do is ask you to select you language , 
the choice here is slightly limited compaired to the X86 Debian , but if 
your reading this in english you will probaly want to select english :).

Next the installer welcomes you and gives you the Debian blurb .. Pressing 
enter will now present the Debian install menu , there are lots of options 
but these are the *ONLY* ones amiga users need to select :

Configure the keyboard

Configure hostname *

Configure the network *

Parition a hard disk

Initalize and activate a Linux swap partition

Initalize a Linux partition

Install Base system

Reboot System.

*If you want to connect to a network

The rest such as installing the kernel ( useless as we have the kernel on 
the amigaOs side already , and i found it broke the installer trying ) and 
making a boot disk aren't needed by us.

3. Keyboard

Chosing your keyboard type is pretty simple , you should be displayed a list 
of keyboards all begining with Amiga and ending with something like us , de 
etc , these extensions are the different countries , so US is unitedstates 
etc . select the one that matches your machine. UK people will probaly feel 
left out here as there is no UK keymap in the list , select the US one , it 
will work enough for now ( we can switch it for a UK map later ) but 
remember that some keys will be switched around such as the £ function of 
the 3 key is now #. People with keyboard adaptors should also select a 
keyboard that matches their original amiga keyboard but keep in mind that 
you may have to search about for keys on some adaptors , some early adaptors 
like mine ; you have to use caps lock as ctrl in amigaOs and linux.

3. Network

The APUS kernels supports PCMCIA network cards ( ones which will work on 
AmigaOS also ) , for this you will either need a clip on CC_Reset fix , Have 
a CC_Reset fix done directly to the board or it may be possible to use an 
AmigaOS side reset patch on start-up.

3. Partitions

To create the partitions the installer presents use with Amiga-Fdisk , 
anyone that has install OpenBSD should be fimilar with this sort of tool.

3. Base Install

This is the last leg of this part of the journey :) , here we get some files 
down on disk and create yourselves a Debian system , i hope your excited.

The first thing the installer asks you is the installation media or source , 
if your using a CD-ROM like me you want to select the CD-ROM option from the 
top of the list , otherwise you will need to select another source , 
information on these will be added later. If you do select the CD-ROM option 
Debian should detect you cd rom and mount it.

Once your selected your source debian should tell you its searching the 
source for the files it needs , It might present you with a messege asking 
if this is the correct path , it hasn't failed me yet and i've installed it 
4 or 5 times so just hit enter . Now you will see the progress as debain 
fetchs , checks and installs the various parts of the base system. If all 
goes will it should bring you back to the main installtion menu. Now select 
reboot system . The system should shutdown and reset , at this point amigaOs 
will kick in again and boot amigaOs off of the harddrive.

Now more on to the post install , i will explain how to create your final 
boot hack line here.

4. Post Install

4.1 Final BootHack Line

Now you have your base system installed you no longer need the Debian 
Installer ram disk image. Your boot hack line should be abit like this:

Bootstrap --APUS -k <kernel path> root=/dev/<harddrive + partition that 
contains the debain base install> <kernel options>

4.2 Base Config

Once booted your new debian system should run the Base-Config script , this 
sets up the little things in the the system like time zone and more 
importantly Apt-get sources which are used to install new software into the 
system. If you need help on Base-Config you should look at the Debian site , 
as its really platfrom indepentant.

TIP : From experience early 2.2.X apus kernels and possibly the one supplied 
on the debian CD-ROM don't read the time correctly , mine currently thinks 
its 1902 , its not a big problem but something to look out for.

4.3 Kernel modules

coming soon

5. What now ?

What now ? Well the next guide will probaly be setting up Xfree86 and a 
desktop environment ... But alas i can't get kernels that do the PCI Probe 
to work on my system and therefor can't run Xfree86 to write a guide on it 
:\ .



Appendix A. Getting and burning a debian iso.

Currently the only way to get any of the Debian Woody iso's is JigDo . JigDo 
basically downloads the individual files inside the iso and rebuilds it. 
This way is not only quicker but your less likely to get CRC error and have 
to download the ISO all over again. you can also upgrade old ISO's by 
scanning them with JigDo and then it will go and download the need files. It 
also saves time when crossing CPU's . Scanning a debian woody PPC cd before 
getting a X86 one will save ~200 meg of downloading.

The problem with JigDo is that at this time there is no amigaOs port , So 
you'll need a Windows or Linux machine to use it.



Appendix B. BootHack settings

Storage / Interfaces

IDE=Doubler - Provides support for 4-way buffered interfaces

nobats - Blizzard users with scsi disks will need to use the "nobats" 
option.



Graphics

video=pm2fb - FrameBuffer driver for Premedia 2 based cards e.g. 
BlizzardVision and CyberVisionPPC

video=amifb - FrameBuffer driver for Amiga Chipset Graphics.

Memory

60nsram - People with 60ns ram can also use the 60nsram option.

Debugging Options

debug=mem

Appendix C. Trouble shooting





-Daniel Palmer


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