Hi, > 1. can debian be installed without os3.x been installed first
I think amiga-lilo can be used to boot Linux. I am not aware of CD boot support on Amigas on the installer CDs, though (Stephen may correct me if I'm wrong). > 2. why doesn't debian have more/currently for sale lan card support That would be because no owner of such hardware bothered to write a driver for Linux. The manufacturers sure won't do it. They mostly do (or help) with the Intel Linux drivers. > 3. how easy is it to make a driver for 3com pcmcia cards ref to : > michael schmitz 15th feb: > > Start with an existing m68k > PCMCIA ethernet driver, and compare that with its mainstream equivalent. Then > apply similar changes to the 3c589 mainstream driver. Look at it this way: you already have a working 3c589 cs driver. You will not have to deal with setting up the network card from scratch, stuffing packets in for sending and reading received packets out. That"s all done for you, by the author of the Intel Linux driver. What you will have to deal with is adapting the interrupt handling as well as (low-level) card register access code. I.e. - what interrupt do I need to register on Amiga, and what address space are the card registers found at for a CS card in general. _That_ portion you can glance from the existing sole CS slot ethernet driver for m68k, as I mentioned. > 4. does this mean u end up wi old kernel?.. No, it just means that the necesary work that needs to be done on the 3c589 cs driver can most clearly be seen in an old version of the kernel (i.e. before the mainstream NE2k cs driver diverged). > 5. is there a walk through guild for doing this? can some1 pls write one! I do not know of a walk-through to m68k kernel hacking. I do know there is plenty of information regarding Linux driver programmming on the web (even published as hardcopy manuals). But it may be hard to look for it not knowing how to phrase the search requests. So here's my very brief rundown on how to get started on this particular project: Basically, you need two things to get started (aside from a working Intel Linux setup): - the m68k kernel source, found at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/geert/linux-m68k.git (in order to retrieve that, you will need the 'git-core' package) - a m68k cross compiler to build the m68k kernel on Intel Linux systems. I am not sure where to find such a cross compiler (I built my own long ago), but see http://people.debian.org/~cts/debian-m68k/cross-compile/ for a description on how to build one yourself. If you cannot build a cross compiler, chances are someone on this list (or linux-m68k) has a recent one you can use. - you can of course build the kernel on the Amiga, but you better have a 50 MHz 060 for that. Plus SLIP networking set up, or a removable disk to supply the kernel source tree. Building a kernel for Amiga should then be as as easy as make ARCH=m68k amiga_defconfig make ARCH=m68k If you can successfully build a kernel for Amiga in this way, you can start to work on porting the driver. Copy drivers/net/pcmcia/3c589_cs.c to drivers/net/amiga_3c589_cs.c - this is the file you will have to adapt to use the Amiga CS interrupt and address range. In order to write to the (little endian) card, you may need to use special access functions that do all byte swapping - look at the apne.c driver what's used there (the PCMCIA slot may be wired up to do the byte swap in hardware so this may be a moot point). Edit drivers/net/Kconfig, locate the APNE section and add a similar section for your driver. Edit drivers/net/Makefile, locate the line mentioning apne.o and add a similar one for your driver (replace apne.o by amiga_3c589_cs.o, remove 8390.o) Run make ARCH=m68k menuconfig, navigate to the network drivers section, activate the new amiga_3c589_cs config option, and recompile. With a bit of luck, there won't be too many compiler errors. Fix the errors by editing amiga_3c589_cs.c until the module builds cleanly. Transfer the module to your Amiga Linux installation and test. Make sure to get the 'dmesg' util in order to retrieve kernel crash messages after reboot, or use a serial line console setup to capture the log output. Most likely, the kernel will trip over invalid memory accesses or get stuck on interrupts - try to find out where it falls over, and change the code to avoid that error. Recompile, retest, repeat. > ( i do want to learn about linux, but this seems like a big thing for > novices to do) As I said above - the driver is already mostly written, and there is another Amiga PCMCIA driver to learn from. You should have at least a working knowledge of C, and should know some basics about how computers work down where the rubber meets the road (i.e. what a register or an interrupt is). > 6. for someone thats only ever used latest versions of linux on intel > machines( where every lan card in the universe seems 2b included) > would there be anything else to consider b4 trying to get to grips wi 68k > linux Not really, aside from the fact that your Amiga Linux box won't have a fast network connection. I can provide some sample scripts and bits to help with a SLIP setup. Cheers, Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
