On Wednesday 05 January 2005 10:03, Sven Luther wrote:

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 10:39:15PM -0000, Leigh Brown wrote:

quoted

Sven Luther said:

quoted

On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 11:11:06PM +0100, Ulrich Teichert wrote:

quoted

Hi,

quoted

Delete the "console=tty0", so you end up with:

Linux/PPC load: console=ttyS0,9600 root=/dev/ram

and try again!

[del]

Right, then the installer knows what to do. I think this should go
into the Debian installation docs, there are a lot of boxes with
graphic cards
out which are not supported by Linux.

Err, it should default to vga tedxt mode if the graphic card fbdev is
not builtin, at least it does it here.

The PReP specs says that the cards should be initialised to a
minimum resolution of 640x480 iirc.  The boot loader has code to
manually reprogram the card *back* into VGA text mode, but only
for a very limited number of cards.  So, if your card is not
supported by fbdev, and isn't one of the very few supported
cards in the boot loader, it simply won't work under PReP.

Ah, ok ... Well i have a cirrus logic card also, and it seems to work. I
have anot yet tried the matrox cards though. Do they need to be special
cards with forth rom, or will any do ?

Well, my box seems to have a matrox video card and I did the install with my 
graphical console, not the tty.

BTW, i have another question. I am trying to fix debian-installer to create
the prep partition, but i would like to have some info on the expected
constraints of said partition. Some tell it has to be entirely in the first
8MB, others the first 5MB, and my powerstack has a 17MB boot partition
right now.

All I can say, it's that my boot PReP partition is the 1st and about 4 MB in 
size (cannot size it less than 1% of the disk.....)
second partition is /
third is swap.

That works for me.

I guess it is really not all that important what the size of the partition
is, it just needs to be first, and the kernel needs to fit in what the
firmware supports.

This goes for various prep boxes, but also for later IBM chrp machines,
including current pseries. It may be problematic, though if the size is too
small, as debian uses an initrd kernel, and altough the kernel itself is
rather small (around 1MB compressed), the current initrd generation method
is not all that fine-grained.

Ah, another thing. I am about to make a new kernel upload, which fixes the
powerstack II (utah) pci irq issue (backported from 2.6.10), but i hear
about problems with other systems, among them the popular 43p-140. Do you
know of any other patch that needs to be applied ? We use a 2.6.8 kernel as
basis, so the stuff will need to be backported, and i think i saw a bunch
of prep fixes in 2.6.9. What about the patches which enables prep-tool ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther