Subject: Advice on linux for an u/g A310

From: Mark <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 14:40:25 +0100

Hello,

I want to install linux on my old A310 and would appreciate a little
advice. It has a 36Mhz arm 3 upgrade and 4meg of ram. I've also got
an ICS IDE interface with an 80meg drive spare. Which kernel should
I use for this setup? and is 80meg enough hd space? It also only has
the original akf11? display (i.e. not VGA). Is this enough?

I mainly want to use it for demand-dial internet access and mail/news.
I will need to get a serial port card and ethernet card so which of
these are best supported?

Thanks for any help,

Mark.

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From: Dave Gilbert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 20:21:16 +0100

> the original akf11? display (i.e. not VGA). Is this enough?

Hi,
  If you have RISC OS 3 then this should be OK (although I've not tried
ICS IDE - does anyone know the status of that??). The boot loader
presently doesn't like RISC OS2; but that is not an insurmountable
problem - I should be able to hack something together for that.

  With 4MB of RAM it will be a bit slow - I wouldn't try running X on it
(actually I'll try it later to tell you how it goes...).
  80MB of space is enough for a lot of things. Don't worry about the
display, it will work - although again X might be hard going.
 
> these are best supported?

Well the good news on that is that an Acorn Ether1 or Ether3 card should
work a treat. The bad news is I haven't finished porting the serial port
driver to the old machines - so your dial up just ain't going to work.
However the good part of the bad news is that I've started porting it -
if you'd asked two or three weeks ago I'd have told you that there was
no work done on it !
Perhaps I'll get some more work done on that tomorrow.

The current known working old machines are:
  1) An A440/1 with RISC OS3, ARM 3, MFM hard drives, and Acorn Ether 1
     - he answers to the name 'klaatu'. He has 4MB OF RAM.

  2) AN R260 (~=A540) with 8MB of RAM, RISC OS3, Acorn Ether3 - he
answers to the name 'oaktree' and we are just trying to get his Acorn
SCSI card working.

I don't think anyone has successufully run IDE on the old machine syet -
I think there may be some work which has to be done to stop the IDE code
trying to mangle the A5000's IDE hardware which of course you haven't
got.
As for kernel versions, the 2.0.31-9 is the best bet; but you'l need
some patches I can give you.
The biggest problem is that there isn't a set of installation discs for
the old machines yet. But if your a good Linux hacker you can easily get
the machines going via netowrk rootfs and build things by hand.
Things are improving.

> Mark.

Dave

-- 
---------------------------------------------------- Man can not live  -
 David Alan Gilbert - gro.gilbert @ treblig.org ---- by bread alone. He 
---------------------------------------------------- needs chocolate.  -

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From: Mark <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 20:30:43 +0000

> problem - I should be able to hack something together for that.

I have got RO3.1 so no problem there. 
> (actually I'll try it later to tell you how it goes...).

I wasn't going to anyway.

> display, it will work - although again X might be hard going.

OK.

> Perhaps I'll get some more work done on that tomorrow.

Is this the internal serial port? because I meant a h/s serial card
because the internal on has never worked and is too slow anyway. I
seem to recall something on the web pages about the Atomwide ones
saying they work fine - is this not so?

I don't have an ethernet card as yet so I will need to get one. Are
the Acorn ones still available? 

> the machines going via netowrk rootfs and build things by hand.

I've got a freeBSD system which I can use for that.

Mark.
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