RS6000Carolina
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RS 6000 Carolina Article
This is a post of an article original written by oPless (me) on the original Linux101 site in 2001
Monday, October 22, 2001
I've recently decided to re-attempt to install linux on my ageing RS/6000 Power PC 830. I've got a few links etc. to check out, and I'll be editing this article to add them.
Stay tuned!
Thursday, October 25, 2001
Well, since IE6 decided to loose my post, I'm writing in notepad first! (Damn computers ;-)
I have an old (96 Vintage) Personal Computer Power Series 830 (No, not the Thinkpad). It is a nice desktop system built to run either AIX or the PPC version of NT. Now when I found out I could get one of these Non-MacIntosh PPC boxes I jumped at the chance. Why? Mainly because when these things came out, I really thought they would obliterate wintel machines, as they were faster, had lots of onboard stuff, and had Motorola parts (I was a great 680x0 fan, my first *nix box was a 680x0 based machine, and it blew the crappy PCs out of the water).
Since the box already booted into some site specific installation of AIX, I decided to remove the hard disk for posterity (500Mb) and install one with a couple of Gb available on it.
With my recent history of failing to boot linux on it last year, I decided to play safe and install NT4 (PPC Edition). Booting from the ARC Disk was successful (argh, url is at home, so I'll probably upload those files here later, complete with the URLs I promised last time.). It correctly found the PC Partitions, and the NTFS drives on there.
After some initial experimenting I found while that the ARC boot disk identified the Harddisk the firmware refused to identify it unless the Master Jumper was removed. *sigh*
After fixing all that, NT4 installed like a dream. Clicking on random .exe files on my filesever brought up the expected \"This image is valid, but it isn't for this computer\" style message. A suprising twist to this was that InstallShield ran! Presumably this was because that Non x86 NTs run win16 and/or DOS apps under emulation. Worthy for further investigation!
Hopefully I shall be able to play mp3s and use VNC on this box just incase that linux doesnt work as well as I hope.
The plan for this box is to eventually run linux, which will probably loose the on board AMD network card, and sound. So putting the two spare network cards in the box to work as a firewall (in preparation to my house move and adsl install) is essential.
Sunday, October 28, 2001
Wow! It's installing (Debian 2.2).
After playing with NT4/PPC I found that it emulated x86 Win 3.x apps adequatly, but not fast enough for the mp3 player I found, so disgusted was I, I didn't play with the MSDOS emulation.
As promised my PowerSeries 830 got installed with linux. Here are the URLs of my source material.
- Hollis Blanchard's guide
- David Monro's kernel page
- Chris and Christine's NT/PPC Page
- SUSE PowerPC Pages
I've yet to install a bootblock on the Hard disk, as I'm booting from floppy at the moment, but once everything is installed, and I've got the cover on it, I'll be fixing that ;-)
Monday, October 29, 2001
Compiling a new kernel has met with limited success, because of modifying David Monro's config for the following kernel patches (against 2.2.19)
carolina.diff.gz ibm_e15fb.diff.gz With this .config
Because I've stupidly not set VGA? console and removed the default boot settings from being a serial console it results in X booting, without a networking or anything I can get into the system with. Luckily I'm booting off a floppy, so at least I can get back in ;)
Current plan -
- Set default boot params to enable serial console.
- Allow logins from the serial ports :-)
- Boot Kernel, and login from COM1
- Set up networking etc.
- Forget about using a monitor on the box ;-)
Wednesday, 12 February 2003
As I'm entering this into the new Linux101 site, at some ridiculous hour in the morning, I've just a couple of things to add.
- I'm still using this machine on a regular basis.
- It is not running as my home firewall, sadly the machine will not initialise PCI cards it doesn't know about. But all the on-board stuff works.
- I'm using it headless, I've no idea if it the thing boots a VGA console anymore.
- The machine just runs XMMS these days, and requires the odd reboot due to sound card issues (a driver problem).
Still I suppose I should take it apart when I have access to a decent digicam and post pictures here. - perhaps.
Saturday, 14 April 2007
Well I moved just over a year ago, and I'm in the process of moving again ... the machine has been sat in my parents garage sitting about gathering dust for the past year! I'm not 100% sure of what I should do with it now, as it'd be a crime to throw it away!
