Subject: Questions about the release of ARM Linux on the Clan CD

From: [email-masked] (John Lagrue)
Date: Sun, 05 Oct 1997 03:31:44 BST

Greetings!

I have been trying to get the release of ARM Linux on the Acorn Clan CD
working on my RiscPC 600, RISC OS 3.5 without any luck, and feel in need
of assistance.

1. The floppy discs images do not seem to work! Certainly the discs cannot
be read by RISC OS after !WriteDisc has been used to copy root-rpc and
sullement to them. Am I correct in thinking that these discs should be
MS_DOS formatted to 1.44Mb?

2. I went to the ARM Linux web pages and retrieved the rpc kernel binary.
According to the install file from the CD this is a 'self-extracting' gzip
archive. Just how do I extract it then? Setting the file type to absolute
and running it just gives an error; gzip doesn't want to know, and neither
does SparkFS.

3. Even if I do get the floppy images correct, and can unpack the kernel
binary, what do I do then? There is nothing in the docs directory to tell
me actually how to install this software.

4. I am using a 1Gb disc under ICS IDEFS, partitioned into 2x500Mb
partitions. I want to put ARM Linux onto the first 500Mb partition, but
!PartMan dosn't seem to want to do anything at all with the disc. Can I
use this configuration?

All help gratefully received :-)

JDL

-- 
John Lagrue

---

From: Ale Terlevich <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 1997 11:51:15 +0100 (BST)

> MS_DOS formatted to 1.44Mb?

  Yep, but after they've been writen to by !WriteDisc, they'll no longer 
be MSDOS formatted, they'll be minix formatted (IIRC) which the linux 
kernel will be able to read once it boots.

> and running it just gives an error; gzip doesn't want to know, and neither

  It self extracts itself whenever you run it, i.e. it operates in 
exactly the same way as an uncompressed kernel image, except that when it 
first boots, you have to wait for about 1 sec while it decompresses 
itself into memory. Don't try to decompress it yourself.

> me actually how to install this software.

  you type
!linux -bootkernel adfs::$.rpc-???

where adfs::$.rpc-??? is whatever you called your kernel.  Don't give it 
any additional arguments, and it'll prompt you for the boot floppies as 
it needs them.

 Hope this is of some help!  I don't know much about the partitioning 
program, but it is a bit clunky.

   Cheers,
	Ale.