I recently had an inquiry about installing Debian natively on a P/390.
Turns out that building an OMA tape with a TDF just doesn't work, or at
least, didn't for me. So....
GETTING DEBIAN RUNNING ON THE P/390
This *should* be a simple matter of crafting a TDF file from the kernel,
parmline, and initrd, and IPLing from it.
It ain't. The PSW stubbornly stays zero when I try that.
So, here is how, with a Hercules instance, and Matt Zimmerman's
Debian-390 3390-1 image, you can create a 3390-1 image that will boot on
your P/390.
First, get Debian running; either do an install from scratch, or boot
the Zimmerman disk and modify it so it works for you. If you do the
second thing, make a copy of the disk first. Once this is done, bring
that second disk online to Linux. For instance, you could configure it
as device 300 in your hercules.cnf, and then do
echo "add device range=0300" >> /proc/dasd/devices
It's old now, so you will need to do this to keep mount from
complaining:
e2fsck /dev/dasd/0300/part1
At this point, I'd go ahead and make it ext3:
tune2fs -j /dev/dasd/0300/part1
And then:
mount -ext3 /dev/dasd/0300/part1 /mnt
Now:
chroot /mnt
Now you're inside the new disk. Edit /etc/zipl.conf. Remove the
vmpoff="LOGOFF" line, and add "condev=0009 mem=124M" (assuming you have
a 128M P/390). The condev line doesn't seem to help. Run zipl.
Remove the PROXY_SERVER lines from /root/dbootstrap.conf.
Remove the network line from /etc/networks.
Add a line like
nameserver ip-of-your-nameserver
to /etc/resolv.conf.
Put the hostname of your debian guest in /etc/hostname.
Put the IP address you'll use in /etc/hosts associated with your
hostname.
Now the crucial bit:
cd /etc/modutils
create a file called lcs.chandev.
My "LCS" (the ethernet card dedicated to the P/390) is at 0400; modify
this according to where yours is on your system. The file should
contain:
lcs-1,0x400,0x401,0,1
This is crucial, and tricky: the ethernet appears as LCS port 1, not, as
you might think, LCS port 0.
now cd arch
Edit the file "s390".
Comment out "alias eth0 qeth" and uncomment "alias eth0 lcs".
Now, cd /etc/network.
Edit the file "interfaces"
Get rid of the CTC definition, and in its place, put
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address my-ip-address
netmask my-netmask
gateway my-gateway
(with my-whatever replaced by the appropriate values, of course)
Now, type "exit" to exit the chroot session.
sync
umount /mnt
halt
and shut down hercules.
Now you need to run
cckd2ckd Debian-P390 debian.300
Assuming that the disk you just were working on is Debian-P390 and
debian.300 is what you want to call it on the P/390 side. You need to
do this because the P/390 doesn't understand compressed DASD.
Now, FTP the file over to the OS/2 system that contains the P/390, or
get it there somehow--zip it, and put it on a CD, or whatever. Unpack
it to whatever the path you have in the configurator for the boot disk
is.
Now IPL the P/390. You won't get anything on the console, but if you
did all this correctly, the network interface *will* come up and after a
couple minutes you can telnet into the P/390 running Debian.
The base-config will start, and then hang. This is that same damn MTU
bug (and might not affect you, but it does me). So telnet in, do an
"ifconfig eth0 1492", kill the original telnet session, and then run
base-config. From here on out, it's a Debian installation, although you
probably want to make it a minimal installation because you only have
1113 cylinders. Once that's running, you can add more DASD, move /usr
to, say, a 3390-3, and then run dselect to get yourself more stuff.
If I can find space on a site, I may upload my debian.300 disk, but
don't hold your breath.
Enjoy!
Adam
