[clug] ALPHA distribution needed. (long)

[Paul Warren]

Brett Worth wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Paul Warren wrote:
> 
> 
>>Brett Worth provided me with RedHat 7.2, which I have successfully 
>>installed after much stuffing around. (can extrapolate if anyone wants 
>>to hear it!)
> 
> 
> So why spare us?  Everyone likes to hear about someone elses pain. :-)
> 

:o)

First off I had to get MILO to work, this wasn't particularly difficult, 
just shoved it on a floppy and got the ALPHABios to boot it no worries. 
  Next I tried to boot a Debian install kernel from a floppy but find 
that the box does a spontaneous reboot whenever it tries to boot from a 
floppy, even an NT rescue floppy.

next i try and upgrade the firmware (bios for those x86 folks), which I 
can't get to work, even with the right jumpers done on the logic board. 
no matter.

I get the RedHat 7.2 CDs.  Kernel boots fine from the CD, but never 
seems to find the initial ramdisk.  So I put the ramdisk on a floppy, 
and boot the kernel with:

MILO>  boot sr0:/kernels/vmlinux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1

which gets me to the RedHat install console.  Next it asks if I want a 
local CDROM install/NFS/FTP/HTTP etc.  I have a local CDROM so I tell it 
so, and it wants a driver disk which I don't have, so It can't load the 
SCSI drivers to get to the CDROM.

Google around a bit, find that if you boot into expert mode, it will ask 
you for the RedHat extra drivers disk, and load what it needs, easy 
enough.  Now the install gets a bit further, gets to formatting the hard 
drive, and more trouble, decides the disk has a BSD partition label, and 
won't do anything with it, so eventually i get fdisk on to it, and fix 
it up, no worries.  Next i get the dreaded SCSI errors, hard drive is 
toast, any writes get scsi errors.

SO I chuck in a scsi drive from an old mac, and everything installs 
without worries.

Next I have a problem with the Tulip NIC it came with, the drivers load 
up fine, but it doesn't sense the link beat coming from my HP hub, and 
switches to AUI mode.  still haven't resolved this one.

So I try and compile a new kernel. 2.4.21 won't compile, so I'm using 
2.4.9-(some stuff) which came with redhat.

This is my idea of fun.

Kernel compile is taking a long time, 40Mins and counting.  tho I think 
i left in some options I don't need.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Cheers
-- 
Paul Warren
u3292467 at anu dot edu dot au
www.geocities.com/qvack_82/