Subject: Installation problems

From: Melanie Rhianna Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 21:08:09 +0000 (GMT)

Hi

I'm a fairly seasoned i386 linux user (Just about to upgrade to Redhat
5.0) and recently acquired a second IDE drive and decided to put Arm Linux
on my RPC.  (This is actually being written on it using an Amiga A3000).

I've got part the way through the installation on my 1st generation RPC
600 but can't find away to actually read the RPMS.  BTW I've got
everything bar the RPMS from the web/ftp site.  The RPMS are in the
X-files directory on the Acorn clan cd and I assume ArmLinux can't read
this archive anyway but may be wrong.

My current setup is

RPC 600
486SX
Cumana 1 SCSI card
261 Mb IDE
210 Mb IDE
0.5Gb SCSI
Sony 2x CD-ROM

The machine boots from the SCSI drive which is all RiscOS.  The 261Mb
drive is 20Mb filecore, 32 Mb linux swap and the remainder linux native.
The second IDE is essentially a blank filecore IDE.

Basically the installer wont install the cumana_1.o module even though the
startup info shows its found the card.  Neither will it install ppa.o
which means I can't read either a cdrom or a zip disc (I have a parallel
version).  (Incidentally popping up a term in the loaded and checking
/proc/ioports says the system has no parallel port.  It does and it
works!).  Loading from FTP requires a network card which I don't have, as
does NFS (otherwise I would have loaded from my PC Linux box).  So all I
was left with was harddrive, unfortunately this means an ext2 partition
and I can't just set up a drive on my PC linux box because of the
differing partition tables.

Using the installer and the shell I have set up the swap space and
formatted the root partition.  I can mount them and mount the second IDE
using mount -t adfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/adfs but as the boot discs don't have a
copy command I can't copy anything off of it.

Basically I'm stuck and don't know what to do now.  If someone can email
me an ArmLinux cp command can I then create a an ext2 floppy (on my PC
linux box) and then mount and install it with the boot discs.  I can then
copy the RPMS across from my second IDE on to the linux partition and then
install it!

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards

Melanie

=====================================================================
Melanie Rhianna Lewis                      [email-masked]
"An it hurt none, do what thou will"    http://www.defaid.demon.co.uk
=====================================================================

unsubscribe: body of `unsubscribe linux-arm' to [email-masked]

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From: Phil Norman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 21:30:07 +0000 (GMT)

> this archive anyway but may be wrong.

This is quite a tricky process, but I've written an installation guide 
for people installing from the Clan CD.  This can be downloaded from my 
web site (URL in the sig).

> differing partition tables.

Actually, arm-linux can read DOS partitions with no problems.  If you 
format an IDE disc on PC-linux arm-linux should be able to read it fine.

> copy the RPMS across from my second IDE on to the linux partition and then

Ah.. You've just described exactly what's in my installation guide.  In 
this case, there are two things you can do.

1: if you don't already have instimage or base (which are on the ftp 
site), it's probably best to download the installation guide I mentioned 
earlier, since that has both instimage and base in it.  It also has some 
instructions, but ignore these - you've done most of it already and are 
obviously quite competent enough not to need them.  All you need to do is 
put instimage and base in the right places and copy your RPMs across from 
RiscOS.  I have heard rumours of a linux x-files archive reader, but have 
never seen it, so the only way I know how to do it is to copy things 
into zip files (don't use tar - RiscOS tar does unspeakable things to 
filenames extensions, of which rpms have plenty).  Then installation is 
just a case of using the 'hard disc' option.

2: get hold of 'cp' and 'rpm2cpio' and install the rpms by hand ;-)

BTW, nice utilities like cp and unzip (basically everything I thought 
people would possibly need) are included in the installation guide 
archive.  However, you don't need to create an ext2 floppy, since the 
bootable kernels can all read/write msdos-formatted discs (and can 
probably read adfs discs too, but I've never tried that).

Anyway, best of luck,
Phil

-- 
Phil Norman, mailing from Exeter Uni.
Programs available for download from my web page.
email:  [email-masked]
web:    http://newton.ex.ac.uk/general/ug/norman