Hi all,
Last night, after a year of waiting for Linux to finally work with my
hardware and other assorted challenges, I was finally able to get almost
everything in the tool chain to compile! I had to make some changes in the
mknbi-jos Makefile and mknbi.c to get mknbi to compile with Etherboot 4.2.?.
I also found that a few things in the tool chain are undocumented. For
instance, I had to get the blackdown JDK, but no where in the docs was that
mentioned, and no mention of what version was required and/or known to work
either. I ended up getting the latest (1.1.7v3) and it compiles, though I
don't know about running yet. I am using newer version of Etherboot and
nasm than the tested versions, so I don't know yet whether they will run or
not (they do finally compile). I also discovered that bootp is no longer
recommended or distributed with RedHat 6.0. I had to go back and find in in
5.2. I still don't know if this is going to work. According to the
Etherboot documents, DHCP(?) is now recommended instead of bootp in RedHat
6. I don't know why this is the case, but we may need to consider upgrading
our tool chain in order to keep current. I can't go back to RedHat 5.2
because of the above mentioned hardware compatibility problems which were
finally solved with RedHat 6. (RedHat 6, BTW, I have found to be far
superior and much easier to use and work with than 5.2 was. I heartily
recommend an upgrade if you are on 5.2.)
Here are my outstanding problems:
* The i386 build compiles, but the host build does not. It is complaining
about missing a file: /etc/lib/gnu/types.h (or something like that, I dont'
have it in front of me.) And lo and behold, the directory is there, but not
the file. Am I missing an RPM? If so, which one might that be?
* I was able to build the floppy and I tried to boot JJOS over my home
network, but for some reason it couldn't find my NIC. Was there maybe a
configuration step that I could have been missing? What are the standard
steps you need to go through to get that to work reliably I am reasonably
sure I have the right driver (Tulip) for my NIC.
* The above DHCP vs. bootp question.
I also learned yesterday that the maker of one of my video cards (NVIDIA)
has released OS-independent source code for the driver with loads of
documentation. There is a good chance of my being able to massage that into
a driver for JJOS. I will need GRUB first, because that video card is on my
host machine, not the slave.
I'm looking forward to actually seeing this thing run and be able to
contribute!
Regards,
Avery J. Regier
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