Subject: Installing ARM Linux - an odyssey...

From: Peter Köllner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:16:59 +0100

Now that the beast is working I think it is time for a report about
the whole process.

The trouble started when I decided to wait with the installation of Linux
until I got RiscOS 4. This was because I bought a SA-110 RPC which came
with preinstalled software on the hard disk, but without any installation
media. I had got an ethernet card, so I could backup everything to another
machine in the LAN, but I did not want to risk being left with a broken
system in case the reinstallation failed for some reason.

I must add that mail from the countries of europe important regarding to
computer technology - especially ARM-based systems - may take up to 8 weeks
until it arrives here in the f***ing middle of nowhere, so with addition of
the usual 2-6 weeks for money transfers every missing spare part is a pain.

So soon after I installed the ROMs I tried to get the bootloader working. 
Here I got stuck until a few days ago, because it did not work with 
RiscOS 4 until version 3.36. Normally I would scan through the sources 
myself to find the error, but in this situation where I had neither the 
bootloader sources nor any information about what has changed from RO 3.7 
to RO 4 this would not work. Fine. So I waited.

After the bootloader worked, I tried to install the system using ftp. It
looks like I have missed some hint in the documentation about ftp not being
available now, so I only got some errors in the middle of the installation.

Fine. Plan B. So I downloaded the whole RedHat package structure to the
harddisk and tried again.

This would have been a good idea, but just when I started the bootloader
again I knew this was going to fail because I had used the new ADFS F+ for
the hard disk. Naturally, I got another nice collection of errors.

Plan C. I used FTPc to copy the packages to the SUN and tried to install
via NFS. Guess what.

Plan D. Luckily, there was a dead Linux PC sitting in a corner with a cute
little harddisk with almost 5 of the original 6.4 GB still working. So
I ripped off this one and on that occasion one of the nice 16 MB SIMs too.
So I unplugged the CD-ROM and happily formatted the HD with the old ADFS 
and some 3 additional Gigs of Linux FS, and afterwards copied the packages
to the ADFS partition. The new errors came a bit later than the last ones.
Of course the old ADFS only had short filenames, which slightly irritated
the installation program, apart from some overwritten files missing.

Plan E. I took the HD to another Linux PC, repartitioned it and copied
the packages to a Linux partition. Unfortunately, the PC/BIOS partition
scheme would not be recognized by the installer because there was still 
a Filecore/Linux scheme on the drive. I never knew that it was impossible 
to low-level format a harddisk when there was not a single DOS/Win***
computer around.

Plan F. Then I discovered that the installation system had got cpio
and that cpio would recognize tar files. So I tarred the whole package 
structure into one huge file and put it onto an ADFS  partition.
Then I started the installation, switched to virtual console #2,
mounted both the ADFS and the Linux partition and unpacked the tar file
using cpio. Now I had a RedHat harddisk location suitable for the
installation program.

The rest was nearly trivial. There was only one more error stopping the
whole process, complaining about insmod returning 255. This happened on
"insmod loop.o". A quick look into the bin-directory revealed that insmod
was a bit non-functional with a file length of zero. So I replaced it with
a shell script doing nothing as well but returning 0. There were some minor
complains about unknown packages, but ignoring that helped a lot.

So the basic system was running. There was only one more difficulty with
the network connection because the installation process had no option to
set a gateway. I did that by hand.

The next step was to set up X, which is a bit easier than on PC systems
because of the vast choice of RiscPC graphics output options ;-)
Unfortunately the result was not very convincing. Even the fvwm2 standard
color scheme is a bit... strange.

OK. Basically, it works. Not the most complete of Linux implementations,
but I think that is quite normal with a small user/developer base.

BTW, what happened to shared libraries?

-- 
peter koellner                            tel/fax: +34 971 51 85 65
mezzo.net easy technologies S.L.          [email-masked]

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