> I just received my Loongson-3A laptop. I would like to install an > alternative OS. Preferably, Debian Wheeyz, Parabola, anything really.
Both Debian and Parabola have userspace working on 3A and no kernel for it. (Parabola didn't several months ago: due to the lack of English documentation I did not know that 3A doesn't implement some 2F instructions before trying.) Most my attempts at building working kernels for this device failed, maybe you can do this. The 3.5 kernel that was shipped with the device has important bugs related to power management and has some options required by Parabola disabled. Rebuilding it with different config and disabled autohotplug solved this (newer kernels should fix crashes during CPU hotplug). Parabola is slow: important packages like WebKit or Iceweasel have no support for N32 and the graphics driver depending on nonfree firmware isn't provided. xf86-video-modesetting works. > I can't find any instructions in English on how to install such OS, or > where to get OS images. I realize this is probably because the laptop > is new. I used debootstrap from the stock OS to install Debian on another partition. For Parabola extraction of a tar archive with a system installed elsewhere works (using e.g. pacman's --root option). Afterwards I needed to add a /boot/boot.cfg entry. There is no knowledge specific to the laptop needed here, documentation for 2F should work too.
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