I am one of the about 40 users here in Aachen who got an Alpha PC quite cheap
last week (that's the old PC which was sold by Vobis some time ago - case,
board etc. from DEC, should be the Jensen board). Yesterday, I tried installing
Linux on this machine. This is how far I got:
- machine can't boot kernel from floppy, so I dd't the kernel to a scsi disk
on my normal Linux machine. I can boot that kernel, but I can't pass
commandline arguments.
- Installed firmware upgrade (it says version 1.0). Now Windows NT won't boot
any more (what a pity :-)), it even does not enter ARC console mode. I can
boot the kernel from the SRM console, I can give root=/dev/fd0, but if I add
ramdisk=1440 to the parameters, the command is rejected ('UNKN-CMD' or
similar). The kernel boots fine and mounts the floppy as the root fs, but I
can't remove it to install blade.
Now:
- Could either someone with a working system provide a jensen-bootable kernel
with ramdisk and rootdev set correct so I don't need the parameters (Linux-386
rdev does not work)?
- Or: (which would be my long-term preference): Is it possible to install milo
at the beginning of the disk, just like the kernel is installed now? Even when
I get the system up, I do not like the thought of dd'ing a new kernel directly
to the disk, and hoping that it will still work, because otherwise, I would
have to remoce the disk and correct the problem on another system.
BTW: Is there any documentation on the Jensen Board, Firmware upgrades and
especially on the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the SRM console? The only
documentation I got was how to switch to ARC mode and install Windows NT.
Thank you for your help,
Michael
-- Michael Schwingen <michaels@stochastik.rwth-aachen.de> Institut fuer Statistik und Wirtschaftsmathematik, | In the beginning there was Wuellnerstr. 3, 52056 Aachen | nothing, which exploded.