On Wednesday 05 January 2005 10:03, Sven Luther wrote: > On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 10:39:15PM -0000, Leigh Brown wrote: > > Sven Luther said: > > > On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 11:11:06PM +0100, Ulrich Teichert wrote: > > >> Hi, > > >> > > >> >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
