[parisc-linux] Installing Debian on an 712/80

[Brian Barber]

With the older Sun CDROM drive and the full debian-hppa iso, the install was trivial.  One thing that is really remarkable is the "power on to login prompt" speed.  Everything that I have tried so far works great.  This is a brilliant port.

The only hangup I had was installing XFree86.  I tried installing using x-window-system, which kept failing with twm as a broken dependency (Depend: twm is needed but will not be installed / Sorry, broken package [sic - going off the top of my head]).  I installed with x-window-system-core, which was successful, and then installed individual packages as required (e.g. xterm, xdm, etc.)

Thanks for the guidance on the CDROM drive.  That tip might want to find its way into the install documentation for other PARISC rookies.

Cheers,
BB

PS: Now that I have a working machine, how can I help the development effort?

-----Original Message-----
From: "Brian Barber" <brianbarber at myrealbox.com>
To: parisc-linux at parisc-linux.org
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 16:12:14 -0500
Subject: Re: [parisc-linux] Re: Installing Debian on an 712/80

Good news (for me, that is).  A colleague here at work located an older external Sun CDROM, which I believe supports 512k byte segments.  I'll try an install with it this weekend and send an update when I'm successful. (Note the optimism)

Have a good weekend, everyone.

BB

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Bromwich <hppa at fop.ns.ca>
To: Matthew Wilcox <willy at debian.org>
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 18:13:13 -0400 (AST)
Subject: Re: [parisc-linux] Re: Installing Debian on an 712/80

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 23, 2003 at 10:20:01AM -0500, Brian Barber wrote:
>
> > I've done some more digging and come up with the following obstacles:
> > 1) HP machines require active SCSI termination, hence the reason why I could not boot from my (borrowed) external SCSI CD-ROM (passive terminator only)
>
> I'm not sure that's true, but they do require certain CD drives to
> boot from.  I forget the details; something to do with 2k vs 512 byte
> sector sizes.

The industry standard (ie, IBM PC world) is 2048 byte sectors, whereas HP
(and Sun) use 512 byte sectors. If you don't have a drive that supports
512 byte sectors, you won't get anywhere. See the post I made (and
subsequent informative posts from others) at
http://lists.parisc-linux.org/pipermail/parisc-linux/2003-November/021645.html
for more details.

> > If I am correct (jump in here), I am left with bootp/tftp as the only
> > means of booting the machine.  If I take this route, I copy lifimage
> > to the boot directory of my tftp server.  This is where I am stuck.
> > There is no documentation I can find (or discern) that walks one through
> > an install from a tftp-booted machine.  Is there a way for me to mount
> > the Debain CD via nfs and launch the installer from there?

When you boot via tftp you still need a way to communicate with the box,
either using a keyboard and monitor, or (more commonly) via serial
console. Is this the answer to the question you're asking?

Alternatively, when you boot the lifimage I *think* you get the option of
installing from pre-mounted directory (somewhat useless via serial console
- I don't think there's any way to get a shell prompt to premount a
directory), NFS, HTTP or FTP - ie, the usual Debian install methodology. I
suspect your best bet is over NFS.

> I'd like to just point you at the boot HOWTO [1], but it doesn't seem
> to cover this step.  It only covers booting the kernel, not setting up
> your NFS root.  I've had mixed success with using debootstrap to populate
> a minimal nfsroot, then updating to sid and installing new packages.

One thing I noticed is that the config given is using inetd (I use xinetd)
and appears to be using the "standard" tftp, rather than hpa's tftpd. I
recently set up a diskless J200 (imaginatively named "j200"), the config I
used on the server is as follows:

dhcpd.conf:

allow bootp;
option domain-name "fop.ns.ca";
option domain-name-servers 10.2.1.10;
option log-servers 10.2.1.10;
authoritative;
use-host-decl-names on;

host j200 {
  hardware ethernet 08:00:09:8c:d1:41;
  filename "lifimage";
  server-name "10.2.1.10";
  fixed-address 10.2.1.21;
  option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
  option broadcast-address 10.2.1.255;
  option routers 10.2.1.200;
  option domain-name "fop.ns.ca";
  option root-path "10.2.1.21:/j200";
}


xinetd.conf:

service tftp
{
       socket_type     = dgram
       protocol        = udp
       wait            = yes
       user            = root
       #server         = /usr/sbin/tcpd
       #server_args    = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd /tftpboot
       server          = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
       server_args     = -v -s /tftpboot
       disable         = no
}


One tip I noticed is it takes a dog's age to boot with serial console set
to 9600. If you're going to do a serial console, I'd recommend upping the
rate to 19200.

I'm off to Boston tomorrow for a week and a half, but if you're still
having troubles when I get back I can fire up the J200 and write up a
step-by-step if it'd help.

Cheers, Steve



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