If any of you wanted a happy ending, or at least closure, here it is: My serial cable finally arrived but I still could not get the kernel to boot. My first false start was loading the kernel to the same location as on the SheevaPlug, 0x8000000, which put the kernel beyond the DockStar's 128MB of installed RAM, which means Stuart correctly diagnosed my issue. With the u-Boot load address altered, I still got errors though until I tried an uncompressed kernel -- and now Armedslack 13.1 is installing as I speak! Here are my u-Boot commands for the installer:
setenv arcNumber 2097 setenv mainlineLinux yes setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/ram rw usb start fatload usb 0:1 0x1800000 uinitrd-kirkwood-installer fatload usb 0:1 0x6000000 uImage-kirkwood bootm 0x6000000 0x1800000 The aforementioned "mkimage Load Address 00008000" turns out to work fine, as I assume this is actually an offset from whereever the kernel got loaded by u-Boot. I even got the stock, unaltered initrd to boot though of course I had to recompile the kernel to get an uncompressed version of it (maybe the compressed Armedslack kernel could be decompressed, but I don't know how). I'm now using the patched u-Boot from http://jeff.doozan.com/debian/uboot/ installed to mtd3 and chainloaded from the stock crippled u-Boot. The PlugApps bootloader I mentioned earlier was quite limited (no initrd or 'saveenv') so once this fully-functional u-Boot became available (thanks Jeff!), there was no reason to use the PlugApps' and no reason to lump the kernel and initrd into a single file as I had originally envisioned. Though I am using a serial cable, it's theoretically possible to do this without the serial cable by using the fw_envset commands to alter the mtd3 u-Boot from within the DockStar' stock Linux install in NAND. Though the armedslack installer initrd startup scripts look like they should launch dhcpcd and dropbear, neither actually happens on bootup so I still had to run those commands via serial. If this were fixed, then no serial cable would be necessary and the install could be carried out purely via SSH. Anyway, I think I may be the first to boot Slackware on this hardware platform, which is kind of cool. :) Thanks again for the help Stuart and Andrzej! _______________________________________________ ARMedslack mailing list ARMedslack@lists.armedslack.org http://lists.armedslack.org/mailman/listinfo/armedslack