It's been a year or two since I last tried to install the experimental
debian alpha image on my DS10L, and my abiding memory of the last
attempt was banging my head against a problem with creating BSD
disklabel on the ide hard drive due to fdisk being updated a few years
prior to remove the older functionality of BSD disklabels and the
instructions not having been updated since then, and the people I asked
for help had simply been updating their systems instead of doing fresh
installs. The BSD disklabel is required for SRM/IDE systems, and this
system will dual boot from two separate drives alongside a functional
VMS install. I did eventually get the disklabel written using an old
version of fdisk through a process I've since forgotten.
It's on hold for the moment as I tried to run a Gentoo install on the
drive a few hours ago and it appears that the drive is dead, so I'll
need to buy a new drive before I try again.
On 7/11/2019 11:11 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Hi John!
On 7/11/19 2:48 PM, John Blake wrote:
I have a DS10L 617mhz and I can't figure out which version is the best to
attempt to install on it. I'd rather avoid things like this issue with systemd
where they obviously haven't tried to actually test it on an alpha processor,
but I have no problem with recompiling things as necessary (although I would
like to avoid the Gentoo path of recompiling everything).
systemd works the same way on my Alpha XP-1000 as it works on my Intel boxes.
I assume you are talking about the non-functionality of a separate /usr
partition,
but this is something that isn't guaranteed to work well on Linux, no matter
whether
one uses systemd or any other type of init daemon.
The other question I have is whether or not someone has fixed the issue with
fdisk on the system, because I remember the last time I tried to install linux
on the system in question, it wouldn't format the drive with a BSD partition as
was necessary and after some discussion on some mailing list or another it was
discovered that the required functionality had been phased out of fdisk a few
years before, and nobody had noticed on either side that it made it impossible
to follow the given directions on the FAQ/wiki. It was still being
automatically included with the distro and at the time I had to burn an ancient
stable version just to put the partition table right in order to install.
debian-installer doesn't use fdisk (anymore), it uses partman. Did you try any
of
the recent installation images, see [1]. Please note these images are currently
shipped without proprietary firmware.
Adrian
[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2019-07-07/
