On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 01:57:22AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
Package: installation-reports
I retrieved the floppy images at
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc-
small/floppy/
so I could try out a floppy-boot install from them.
I got never even got off the ground...
1) The "boot.img' floppy seems to have nothing on it but the
'vmlinuz' kernel. There's no system folder or any of the other
boilerplate necessary for a bootable floppy. I understand that
there are technical licensing problems with miboot. Nevertheless,
Can you check in the logs to see what happened ? Mmm, indeed :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d- i/images/daily/build_powerpc-small_floppy_boot.log
shows :
# We'd like to use miboot, but it isn't in the archive yet ...
#miboot -c ./tmp/powerpc-small_floppy_boot/miboot.conf
# ... so instead we do some grungy HFS hacking.
I wonder who did that modification, and i probably pulled it in when upgrading :/
there at least ought to be a README file somewhere that gives the
adventurous user, willing to ignore the licensing problems, the
necessary magic incantations to transform this neutered thing into
a live/virile/bootable floppy by mixing it with miboot (however
obtained) under the light of a full moon at midnight.
What i would really like is to have miboot go at least to contrib
if not main.
The step to do this is for someone else than me though, or i would
not be able
to do the reimplementation. The idea is to look at the miboot boot
block
format, and extract the first header part (which is ok to reuse)
and the
little bit of code afterward, which are rumored to be trap calls
to the mac
rom, in m68k assembly. And describe what it is doing, so a clean-room reimplementation can be done from it.
2) The 'root.img' file is bigger than will fit onto a 1.44 MB
floppy. Worse, for all it's size, it seems to contain nothing but
a 'lost+found' directory -- no install scripts or anything else!
Is there a different place I should be getting the floppy images from?
Nope, someone broke them, and svn seems broken right now :/
BTW, can you look at the kernel found here :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d- i/images/daily/powerpc/netboot/vmlinuz-coff.initrd
and try to boot it from the serial console OF and write an
installation report ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
On Wednesday, August 11, 2004, at 05:25 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 01:57:22AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
Package: installation-reports
I retrieved the floppy images at
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc- >>small/floppy/
so I could try out a floppy-boot install from them.
I got never even got off the ground...
1) The "boot.img' floppy seems to have nothing on it but the
'vmlinuz' kernel. There's no system folder or any of the other >>boilerplate necessary for a bootable floppy. I understand that
there are technical licensing problems with miboot. Nevertheless,
Can you check in the logs to see what happened ? Mmm, indeed :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d- >i/images/daily/build_powerpc-small_floppy_boot.log
shows :
# We'd like to use miboot, but it isn't in the archive yet ...
#miboot -c ./tmp/powerpc-small_floppy_boot/miboot.conf
# ... so instead we do some grungy HFS hacking.
I wonder who did that modification, and i probably pulled it in when >upgrading :/
there at least ought to be a README file somewhere that gives the >>adventurous user, willing to ignore the licensing problems, the
necessary magic incantations to transform this neutered thing into
a live/virile/bootable floppy by mixing it with miboot (however
obtained) under the light of a full moon at midnight.
What i would really like is to have miboot go at least to contrib
if not main.
The step to do this is for someone else than me though, or i would
not be able
to do the reimplementation. The idea is to look at the miboot boot
block
format, and extract the first header part (which is ok to reuse)
and the
little bit of code afterward, which are rumored to be trap calls
to the mac
rom, in m68k assembly. And describe what it is doing, so a clean-room >reimplementation can be done from it.
2) The 'root.img' file is bigger than will fit onto a 1.44 MB
floppy. Worse, for all it's size, it seems to contain nothing but
a 'lost+found' directory -- no install scripts or anything else!
Is there a different place I should be getting the floppy images from?
Nope, someone broke them, and svn seems broken right now :/
BTW, can you look at the kernel found here :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d- >i/images/daily/powerpc/netboot/vmlinuz-coff.initrd
and try to boot it from the serial console OF and write an
installation report ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
I'll look into making a null-modem (8-pin mini-din on both ends!)
cable so I can use one machine as a serial console for the other.
If I can do that, I'll give your suggestion a try.
In the mean time, would it work with BootX?
On Wednesday, August 11, 2004, at 05:45 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:25:48AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
# We'd like to use miboot, but it isn't in the archive yet ...
#miboot -c ./tmp/powerpc-small_floppy_boot/miboot.conf
# ... so instead we do some grungy HFS hacking.
I wonder who did that modification, and i probably pulled it in when >>upgrading :/
Ah, it is fixed, Colin Watson did this :/
I wonder if we should not do a miboot upload to non-free and be gone
with it. This would mean a debian-installer-non-free or something
such.
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:57:52AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
On Wednesday, August 11, 2004, at 05:45 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:25:48AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
# We'd like to use miboot, but it isn't in the archive yet ...
#miboot -c ./tmp/powerpc-small_floppy_boot/miboot.conf
# ... so instead we do some grungy HFS hacking.
I wonder who did that modification, and i probably pulled it in when >>upgrading :/
Ah, it is fixed, Colin Watson did this :/
Of course, and I told you about it at the time, but you apparently
rarely remember anything that anybody else says.
I made those changes because the package *did not autobuild* without
them, which isn't acceptable.
I wonder if we should not do a miboot upload to non-free and be gone
with it. This would mean a debian-installer-non-free or something
such.
This sounds like a pretty awkward time to make such changes, but
whatever.
I certainly think that the debian-installer images should come with instructions on how to make the floppy images bootable with miboot. I
left the miboot.conf lying around rather than deleting it for pretty
much that reason, but I lacked the expertise to go further.
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:55:28AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
In the mean time, would it work with BootX?
No, don't think so, but the plain vmlinux/initrd.gz work with bootx.
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:57:52AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
On Wednesday, August 11, 2004, at 05:45 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:25:48AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
# We'd like to use miboot, but it isn't in the archive yet ...
#miboot -c ./tmp/powerpc-small_floppy_boot/miboot.conf
# ... so instead we do some grungy HFS hacking.
I wonder who did that modification, and i probably pulled it in when >>upgrading :/
Ah, it is fixed, Colin Watson did this :/
Of course, and I told you about it at the time, but you apparently
rarely remember anything that anybody else says.
On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 12:18, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:55:28AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
In the mean time, would it work with BootX?
No, don't think so, but the plain vmlinux/initrd.gz work with bootx.
I know. That's the method I've been using all this time to test the businesscard and netinst CDs...
So what, exactly, is it about the boot floppies that needs testing, and
can be tested without miboot?
On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 12:18, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:55:28AM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
In the mean time, would it work with BootX?
No, don't think so, but the plain vmlinux/initrd.gz work with bootx.
I know. That's the method I've been using all this time to test the businesscard and netinst CDs...
So what, exactly, is it about the boot floppies that needs testing, and
can be tested without miboot?
I'm happy to help, but I need to know what I can do that will help...
On Friday, August 13, 2004, at 09:53 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
Can you please retry the miboot boot floppies tomorrow ? I fixed the >daily-builds to rebuild the actual miboot floppies.
Now, the only problem remaining would be the root floppy being too
big, and
the actual 2.6 kernel based miboot floppies.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Hi Sven!
Sorry for the delay on getting this done.
I downloaded the boot and root (and other) images from
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc-small/floppy/ See appendix 1.
After some fooling around with a dirty floppy drive and some poor
quality floppy disks (I *hate* dealing with floppy disks! The
floppy drives on Old Macs are almost invariably in poor shape.
This is one reason I strongly recommend that people use BootX
instead if they have the option.) I eventually succeeded in writing
(and verifying) the images to physical floppies.
First observation:
The root image is larger than (1474560=1440*1024) bytes, so dd gets
an error trying to write it to /dev/fd0. See appendix 2.
Second observation:
When I loop mount the root.img, all the stuff necessary for booting
seems to be there (confirmed later by actually booting off of it)
See appendix 3.
Third observation:
I booted from the boot floppy. It read the floppy, did the normal
kernel initialization stuff and finally ejected the boot floppy
with the message "Insert root floppy"..."press ENTER". Which I
did. It printed "RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0" then
read for a while then stopped reading (no noise from the floppy
drive). And it hung. I gave it several minutes. Nothing
happened. No error messages on the console -- nothing. See my
next opservation for one possible explanation of this behavior.
Thanks Rick for testing it. I will build 2.6.8 miboot kernels
today, could you
possibly give it a try to see if it boots this evening or
something such ?
it hung. I gave it several minutes. Nothing
happened. No error messages on the console -- nothing. See my
next opservation for one possible explanation of this behavior.
I don't think this is it. I believe that maybe it failed because
it is trying
to read post the end of the floppy or something.
Can you please retry the miboot boot floppies tomorrow ? I fixed the daily-builds to rebuild the actual miboot floppies.
Now, the only problem remaining would be the root floppy being too
big, and
the actual 2.6 kernel based miboot floppies.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Index of /~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc-small/floppy
Name Last modified Size Description ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Parent Directory 07-Jul-2004 00:25 -
asian-root.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.2M
boot.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
cd-drivers.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
net-drivers.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
ofonlyboot.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
root.img 15-Aug-2004 21:08 1.4M ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Apache/1.3.26 Server at people.debian.org Port 80
$ cd /tmp/DebianFloppys/
$ ls -lA
total 12860
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1474560 Aug 16 00:10 boot.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1467392 Aug 16 00:12 cd-drivers.img -rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1467392 Aug 16 00:12 net-drivers.img -rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1474560 Aug 16 00:13 ofonlyboot.img -rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1514521 Aug 16 00:10 root.img
$
# cd /tmp/DebianFloppys/
# mount -t hfs -o loop boot.img /mnt/floppy/
# ls -lAR /mnt/floppy/
/mnt/floppy/:
total 1166
dr-xr--r-- 2 root root 8 Aug 16 2004 .finderinfo dr-xr--r-- 2 root root 8 Aug 16 2004 .resource
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 .rootinfo
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 Finder
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 System
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1193284 Aug 16 2004 zImage
/mnt/floppy/.finderinfo:
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 Finder
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 System
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 zImage
/mnt/floppy/.resource:
total 78
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 Finder
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 79593 Aug 16 2004 System
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 zImage
#
# cp root.img root.gz
# gunzip root.gz
# mount -t ext2 -o loop root /mnt/floppy
# ls -lAR /mnt/floppy
/mnt/floppy:
total 1
drwx------ 2 root root 1024 Aug 15 22:46 lost+found
/mnt/floppy/lost+found:
total 0
#
On Monday, August 16, 2004, at 03:18 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
Thanks Rick for testing it. I will build 2.6.8 miboot kernels
today, could you
possibly give it a try to see if it boots this evening or
something such ?
Sure. Expect my report at about the same time tomorrow that I
posted today's.
Can you try the following boot img :
http://people.debian.org/~luther/miboot/boot-2.6.img
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