On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 01:58:25PM +0100, Richard Simpson wrote:
> Gentlemen (and ladies?),
>
> Over this last weekend I made a determined effort to get the latest Mandrake
> Alpha working on my LX164 and am amazed to report reasonable success. In the
> absence of an installer (I couldn't find one newer than Jan 2000), I mounted my
> new hard drive under my current system and made creative use of 'rpm --root'
> and chroot to do a minimal install. To my complete amazement, the system
> booted and ran with very few difficulties. I haven't tried anything advanced
> like X or (and here I may be realy pushing my luck) KDE, but I can log in,
> access remote FTP sites via my firewall and compile a new kernel.
>
The last time I checked (7mdk of XFree86 4.0.3) it built fine on the Alpha.
I can't verify for now since things are automated around here, I guess the
build scripts haven't had the time to build a newer XFree86 yet.
For KDE, I've also verified that it compiles.
I'm quite sure that it works but:
If you are not sure just give it a try and report back here, or if you know
that it's a program problem, not a packaging problem, then you can report
back to the maintainer of the software component.
> In the course of doing this I found a few minor problems which folks may wish
> to look at:
>
> 1) By default /etc/securettys is blank. I took me ages to work out why I
> couldn't log in. I presume that the installer normally sets this based on the
> security level chosen, but for those not using the installer, it might be nice
> if it contained a default entry of 'tty1'.
>
I believe that you should login as normal user and then su to root. In
terms of security it is a bit safer than allowing direct root tty logins.
> 2) The kernel source 2.4.3 RPM has a dependency on ncurses-devel, but cooker
> has no such RPM available (either in Alpha or i586 so far as I can see). In
> the end I used the one from RedHat 7.
>
I think it should be libcurse5-devel which contains this.
> 3) Building the aic7xxx driver in the latest kernels requires byacc, flex and
> db1-devel (God knows why!). These need to be added as dependencies to the
> kernel source RPM. Ah, minor thought. I installed the kernel source RPM, but
> I actually compiled a default kernel from ftp.kernel.org. Perhaps the Mandrake
> kernel doesn't have these requirements. I will try to check tonight, but I
> can't see why the aic7xxx driver would be different.
>
Juan?
For flex I am aware of this, since aicasm which BTW we don't include that in the
kernel rpm anyway, Chmouel told me is obsolete, needs flex.
> Thinking about it, I suspect that none of these problems are AXP specific
> except for the fact that they are only likely to bite you if you don't have an
> installer. Perhaps I should report them to the main cooker list, or can
> someone from Mandrake pass them on?
>
Yes, we don't have an installer for the latest cooker yet. ;) In particular,
we need to build a newer Alpha BOOT kernel, along with the modules. Otherwise,
everything else in the installer should be (fairly?) portable.
-- Geoffrey Lee <snailtalk@linux-mandrake.com> 李長風$ /usr/games/fortune Anything that can go wrong will go Segmentation fault (core dumped) $
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