On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 09:29:45PM -0400, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > I am pleased to announce to this list the release of Debian GNU/Linux > version 3.0 (woody). This latest release of Debian is available for a total > of 11 hardware architectures, including, for the first time, IBM S/390.
Since I was asked this a couple of times, here is a bit more about Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 for S/390: We are shipping the standard Linux kernel 2.4.17 with these patches applied: - linux-2.4.17-s390.tar.gz from developerWorks (released on 2002.02.05) - linux-2.4.17-s390-1-lcs.tar.gz from developerWorks (released on 2002.03.04) - linux-2.4.17-s390-2.tar.gz from developerWorks (released on 2002.04.15) - a patch by Gerhard Tonn which adds support for a second initrd (this can be used for OCO modules by the installation system) - the cpint-patch by Neal Ferguson which allows to invoke CP commands from Linux - the cmsfs-patch by Rick Troth which enables read only access to CMS disks This means that the lcs module is included and can also be used by the installation system. The qdio and qeth OCO modules are not included but can be downloaded from developerWorks and loaded into the shipped kernel. Later Debian releases will switch to the 2.4.17 "May 2002 stream" kernel and include SCSI over FCP support. Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 consists of over 8000 binary packages, only less than 50 of them are not available on the S/390 architecture. But this mainly includes PC-specific packages like boot loaders or hardware management software, so over 99.5% of all packages are available. This also includes the complete KDE and Gnome desktop environments with Mozilla 1.0 and movie players, even if it does not make a lot of sense to run them on S/390. LVM, EVMS and the MD tools are included in the distribution but are not supported by the installation system. This means that you can install the Debian base system on a DASD and then use these tools to merge multiple DASDs into a single large volume for application and user data. Debian/390 supports the traditional ext2 file system and the new ext3 journaling file system. Simple RPM and LSB (Linux Standard Base) packages can be installed with the alien package. We have successfully tested this with IBM's JDK 1.3.1 for Linux/390. Security updates will be made available for everybody free of charge at http://security.debian.org/. This page also contains information on how to automatically or manually download and install them. Installation requires 16 MB RAM and 400 MB disk space but more disk space is highly recommended since packages need to be downloaded into /var before they can be installed. We did some tests on z/VM with a 16 MB RAM Linux guest and had no problems running Apache inside it. Of course, more RAM is needed for most other applications or better performance. The Debian S/390 porting team would like to thank the IBM Linux Community Development System (LCDS) and Millenux for hosting our S/390 build servers and the IBM labs in Boeblingen for their support. Regards, Stefan Gybas
