[gentoo-alpha] Woo-hoo! (or "Successful Miata Installation Notes")

[gentoo-alpha] Woo-hoo! (or "Successful Miata Installation Notes")

[maillist]

After several nights of hardware configuration issues and Gentoo/doc
issues, she's up and running.  Woo-hoo!  My system is:

Miata 500au 500Mhz
1GB Mem (1x512, 2x256)
DEC/Symbios Logic 53c875 dual-channel FW SCSI card
2x4.3GB RZ29B (Seagate ST15150W) drives
LG CRD-8322B 32x IDE CDROM (Orig 32x Toshiba XM-6102B swapped out in
testing bad LiveCDs)
DLT7000 bare tape drive (not installed yet).

Here's some of the installation notes I've made (pasted from my local Wiki):

    * The 1.4-test4 LiveCD does not work on a Miata.

    * The 1.4-test3 LiveCD continually causes seg faults and other errors
when copying files from the CD to RAMdisk during the boot. In order to
possibly get the CD to boot after several tries:
         1. Alpha must be at the SRM prompt (">>>").
         2. Make sure no commands have been entered since the last
init/power on. If there are, init or warmstart the Alpha.
         3. show dev
         4. b dka0 -flags 4
         5. At the aboot prompt, l
         6. Enter "0" at the aboot prompt to boot off of the first entry
listed.
         7. The file copy to RAM will still cause errors, but it should
ignore them.
         8. If it still fails, start over making sure to init/warmstart
first.
         9. Not sure why this sometimes works (serendipity is a wonderful
thing), but it did for me...

    * Save the headaches and grab the Gentoo2004 LiveCD from the
experimental directory on the Gentoo mirrors.  It worked without a
hitch.

    * The stage1 ISO in the "mirrors" directory will not work.  The
portage package is hosed and I could not make the reported patches
work.  Instead grab
http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/experimental/alpha/stages/stage1-alpha-20040730.tar.bz2
(substitute your local mirror in the URL)

    * CFLAGS="-mieee -O3 -pipe -mcpu=ev56"

    * Kernel
          o gentoo-dev-sources (2.6.8-gentoo-r1)
          o ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~alpha" emerge -v gentoo-dev-sources

    * aboot
          o Package "aboot" (v0.9) will error out trying to compile.
          o Grab 1.0 instead
          o ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~alpha" emerge -v aboot

    * DO NOT USE QLOGIC ISP1020 SCSI CARD! There are many folks on various
lists who have complained that the driver causes FS corruption under
2.6 because of a lack of proper porting.

I've also noticed several (all?) aboot docs saying that "dqa0" denotes the
IDE device 0, but it's not true for all Alphas, including the Miata.  OK,
at least *my* Miata has the IDE CDROM as device "DKA0".  My two SCSI
drives are "DKA0" and "DKA100" (SCSI ID 0 and 1, respectively).

That's all.  I've had a helluva (in a wierd way, fun) time getting this to
work.  If I hadn't done several Intel/AMD Gentoo installs and if I hadn't
worked with DEC stuff for 10 years in a previous life, I don't know that I
could have pulled this off.  There's several little gotchas whose answers
could not be found in Google, but took a little experimentation,
guesswork, and experience.  I guess I'm hoping that someone else doing a
Google search on the same stuff I ran into would have one-stop shopping.

And now back to my 80MB emerge, already in progress.  :)

Rich J.


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