Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Stefan Niestegge]

Am 11.02.2018 um 00:48 schrieb Michael Schmitz:

Hello Adrian,


The console keyboard map is for american layout: @ is on shift-2, ~ is
on shift-~, | is on shift-#, [ is on ü, ] is on + (curly brackets on
shift with same keys) with my german layout keyboard. No idea why I used
the american layout, I'm sure I had taken down the german raw keycodes
at some stage when rewriting the keyboard driver.


When did that rewrite happen? When we were testing 3.19 back in 2015,
the keyboard seemed to work well on the Falcon. There was only one key
mapping missing which we actually fixed during the meeting :-).


The keymap in use is from October 2007, so predates 3.19 by a decade or
so. Probably even earlier - I don't think I had the Falcon unpacked and
set up at that stage yet.

The keymap from 2015 should still work for all I can see. In actual
fact, there is a change from 2015 (adding KEY_102ND) in the input driver
meaning you fixed the default map in the kernel and might not have used
a console map at all...

Cheers,

Michael






What should i do to find out which keymap version i use, and if
outdated, what is to do to get the new version?

The system has been apt-get updated and upgraded.

Greets,
Stefan

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Stefan Niestegge]

Am 11.02.2018 um 00:31 schrieb Michael Schmitz:

Hello Adrian,




While looking at the kernel output at boot i saw that my Network card
is indeed supported (i thought it wasn't until 2 days ago!). It only
needed the MAC address to be set manually, then the eth0 came up.
This is more a firmwar bug of the "EtherNAT" network card that has no
MAC adress default.


Yes, MAC addresses are normally set in the firmware. You might be able
to reprogram your network card's firmware chip to fix the issue.


The EtherNAT doesn't have a MAC address PROM, or any other way to store
the MAC address in the firmware. The guys designing the card never
bothered to get a MAC range assigned for their hardware. You're suppose
to hijack the address of some dead network card you happen to have
around, and set it each time the card is powered up.

Cheers,

Michael



That one is a hardware bug, not related to debian and can be worked
around with simple configuration.

Thanks
Beetle

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Michael Schmitz]

Hello Adrian,

> 
>> While looking at the kernel output at boot i saw that my Network card
>> is indeed supported (i thought it wasn't until 2 days ago!). It only
>> needed the MAC address to be set manually, then the eth0 came up.
>> This is more a firmwar bug of the "EtherNAT" network card that has no
>> MAC adress default.
> 
> Yes, MAC addresses are normally set in the firmware. You might be able
> to reprogram your network card's firmware chip to fix the issue.

The EtherNAT doesn't have a MAC address PROM, or any other way to store
the MAC address in the firmware. The guys designing the card never
bothered to get a MAC range assigned for their hardware. You're suppose
to hijack the address of some dead network card you happen to have
around, and set it each time the card is powered up.

Cheers,

Michael

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Michael Schmitz]

Hello Stefan,


Am 11.02.2018 um 01:07 schrieb Stefan Niestegge:
> Hello Michael,
> 
> 
> Am 10.02.2018 um 03:01 schrieb Michael Schmitz:
>> Hello Stefan,
>>
>> what's wrong with the old falcon IDE driver? pata_falcon should not be
>> necessary, and may even be detrimental to performance (it doesn't use
>> interrupts, rather it polls for completion of ATA commands).
> 
> Probably nothing wrong with it, but with the kernel from the netinstall
> iso no IDE was detected at all. A module was needed to be loaded and
> pata_falcon was tried at first, and was successful. After the installer
> installed to /dev/sda3 it made no sense to modprobe falconide that would
> create /dev/hda nodes.

You could have tried the falconide module instead which ought to be
present as well.

Testing the libata Falcon IDE driver is certainly worth doing, but I
question the wisdom of doing that in the installer context.

>>
>> The console keyboard map is for american layout: @ is on shift-2, ~ is
>> on shift-~, | is on shift-#, [ is on ü, ] is on + (curly brackets on
>> shift with same keys) with my german layout keyboard. No idea why I used
>> the american layout, I'm sure I had taken down the german raw keycodes
>> at some stage when rewriting the keyboard driver.
> 
> i choosed german keyboard at D-I setup and shift-2 is ", shift-~ is °
> shift-# is ' ...

Might be a standard PC keymap. m68k keyboard drivers used to send raw
keycodes. Now that keyboard input passes through the input driver. they
have to send standard keycodes, i.e. remapping to these standard codes
(which happen to be PC keyboard codes) happens in the keyboard driver.
The layout you describe would certainly fit that.

>> If these keys don't work for you, try without loading a key map.
> 
> will try to figure that out.

No call for that unless you can't get the missing keys to work on that
map. But a specific Falcon keymap would be easier to derive that way.

>>
>> xserver needs support for the Atari pixel format (interleaved planes).
>> Shouldn't be too hard to do, but Xorg code probably isn't for the faint
>> of heart (I've certainly had enough to last me a lifetime).
> 
> so, remove Xorg and install old XFree86?
> 
> hmm. my supervidel supports 8-bit chunky as well as 16 bit (compatible
> to the Falcon 320x200 "truecolor". we could also give Xorg what it
> needs to be happy.

Yes, that would work as well but limits resolution. As far as I
understand Geert, Xfbdev would have support for the planar pixel formats
so use that instead of Xorg.

Cheers,

Michael


> 
> Greetings,
> Stefan
> 

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 02/11/2018 12:15 AM, Stefan Niestegge wrote:
> Yes, we had it running. But we used fvwm. This time, when the installer
> asked me, i choosed LXDE. Probably this does not support 8-bit colors?

I don't think the choice of window manager should make any difference
here. We actually saw a crash as is evident from the backtrace in
the Xorg.0.log file.

> But then, Falcon supports 16 Bit (65k colors) in 320x240 and 320x480.
> I can boot clean, change to one of these modes, and then bootstrap
> Debian with the "video=atafb:keep" option.
> After booting and login, i can "startx" to a desktop.

I'm quite confident that LXDE should also work with 256 colors.

> I added "atarimouse" to /etc/modules, and have a small but working
> LXDE Gui.  \o/ party :)

Nice.

> My GFX card (i had the same in 2015) supports much better modes.
> But i can't set those without starting a programm before bootstra.tos,
> and then Debian won't boot.

Well, someone needs to write a driver for it.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Geert!

On 02/10/2018 07:41 PM, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> 8 bpp short work on Atari.

There was apparently a crash which can be seen from the backtrace
in the Xorg.log file. Possibly a regression?

> How old is Debian's Xorg?

The machine has been installed with Debian unstable, so the Xorg
version is the latest upstream version.

> All of "[PATCH 00/18] Xfbdev Atari and Amiga support"
> (https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2013-March/035831.html)
> were integrated shortly after posting them.
Those patches should definitely be in.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On 02/10/2018 02:07 PM, Stefan Niestegge wrote:

Am 10.02.2018 um 03:01 schrieb Michael Schmitz:

[...]

xserver needs support for the Atari pixel format (interleaved planes).
Shouldn't be too hard to do, but Xorg code probably isn't for the faint
of heart (I've certainly had enough to last me a lifetime).


so, remove Xorg and install old XFree86?

hmm. my supervidel supports 8-bit chunky as well as 16 bit (compatible
to the Falcon 320x200 "truecolor". we could also give Xorg what it
needs to be happy.


Or monochrome for larger resolutions?

Most of modern apps don't work that well with monochrome though.


- Eero

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 7:41 PM, Geert Uytterhoeven
 wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 1:51 AM, Stefan Niestegge  wrote:
>> -xserver crashes
>>
>> I'd need help with that. I'll append the dmesg.txt and xorg.log files.
>> Let me know if you want more logfiles or remote access.
>
>> (II) FBDEV(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
>>   "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 8/8
>> (==) FBDEV(0): Depth 8, (==) framebuffer bpp 8
>> (==) FBDEV(0): Default visual is PseudoColor
>> (==) FBDEV(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
>> (II) FBDEV(0): hardware: Atari Builtin (video memory: 604kB)
>> (II) FBDEV(0): checking modes against framebuffer device...
>> (II) FBDEV(0): checking modes against monitor...
>> (--) FBDEV(0): Virtual size is 640x480 (pitch 640)
>> (**) FBDEV(0):  Built-in mode "current": 25.2 MHz, 31.5 kHz, 59.9 Hz
>> (II) FBDEV(0): Modeline "current"x0.0   25.18  640 658 758 800  480 491 494 
>> 525 -hsync -vsync -csync (31.5 kHz b)
>> (==) FBDEV(0): DPI set to (96, 96)
>> (EE) FBDEV(0): interleaved planes are not yet supported by the fbdev driver
>
> 8 bpp short work on Atari.

s/short/should/

> How old is Debian's Xorg?
>
> All of "[PATCH 00/18] Xfbdev Atari and Amiga support"
> (https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2013-March/035831.html)
> were integrated shortly after posting them.

Or is this due to the wrong backend? FBDEV versus Xfbdev?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

Hi Stefan,

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 1:51 AM, Stefan Niestegge  wrote:
> -xserver crashes
>
> I'd need help with that. I'll append the dmesg.txt and xorg.log files.
> Let me know if you want more logfiles or remote access.

> (II) FBDEV(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
>   "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 8/8
> (==) FBDEV(0): Depth 8, (==) framebuffer bpp 8
> (==) FBDEV(0): Default visual is PseudoColor
> (==) FBDEV(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
> (II) FBDEV(0): hardware: Atari Builtin (video memory: 604kB)
> (II) FBDEV(0): checking modes against framebuffer device...
> (II) FBDEV(0): checking modes against monitor...
> (--) FBDEV(0): Virtual size is 640x480 (pitch 640)
> (**) FBDEV(0):  Built-in mode "current": 25.2 MHz, 31.5 kHz, 59.9 Hz
> (II) FBDEV(0): Modeline "current"x0.0   25.18  640 658 758 800  480 491 494 
> 525 -hsync -vsync -csync (31.5 kHz b)
> (==) FBDEV(0): DPI set to (96, 96)
> (EE) FBDEV(0): interleaved planes are not yet supported by the fbdev driver

8 bpp short work on Atari.

How old is Debian's Xorg?

All of "[PATCH 00/18] Xfbdev Atari and Amiga support"
(https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2013-March/035831.html)
were integrated shortly after posting them.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 02/10/2018 01:07 PM, Stefan Niestegge wrote:
> Probably nothing wrong with it, but with the kernel from the netinstall
> iso no IDE was detected at all. A module was needed to be loaded and
> pata_falcon was tried at first, and was successful. After the installer
> installed to /dev/sda3 it made no sense to modprobe falconide that would
> create /dev/hda nodes.

Geert said that the m68k pata_* drivers will need some extra small changes
to support automatic module loading. I did actually add such changes to
the VIO drivers on SPARC myself because those drivers also didn't load
automatically. If the changes necessary are the same, then it's a trivial
problem to fix in the kernel.

> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=36128d204b81c099b5779771127a5546eac549c9
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=5bde2c9be701c4583f0a9243bd46590ec401bfba

>> The EtherNAT will remember the MAC address across reboots, but some hack
>> to set a fixed address after module load might be in order. My EtherNAT
>> is toast so I can't test that myself.
> 
> Perhaps i can take a look at your EtherNAT if you attend to m68k meetup.
> i revived a broken EtherNAT by simply reprogramming the FPGA.

Michael is located at the other end of the globe. Not sure whether he will
be able to make it :-). Would be very cool though.

>> The console keyboard map is for american layout: @ is on shift-2, ~ is
>> on shift-~, | is on shift-#, [ is on ü, ] is on + (curly brackets on
>> shift with same keys) with my german layout keyboard. No idea why I used
>> the american layout, I'm sure I had taken down the german raw keycodes
>> at some stage when rewriting the keyboard driver.
> 
> i choosed german keyboard at D-I setup and shift-2 is ", shift-~ is °
> shift-# is ' ...

Can you try switching to a US keyboard layout?

Run "dpkg-reconfigure console-setup" as root to do that.

>> xserver needs support for the Atari pixel format (interleaved planes).
>> Shouldn't be too hard to do, but Xorg code probably isn't for the faint
>> of heart (I've certainly had enough to last me a lifetime).
> 
> so, remove Xorg and install old XFree86?

XFree86 is long dead and probably won't even work with modern kernels,
so I don't think this is any sensible option. You will also most likely
not be able to run any modern X applications with XFree86.

> hmm. my supervidel supports 8-bit chunky as well as 16 bit (compatible
> to the Falcon 320x200 "truecolor". we could also give Xorg what it
> needs to be happy.

Did you configure the driver to be used as "fbedv" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf?

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 02/10/2018 01:51 AM, Stefan Niestegge wrote:
> since someone on #atari-home IRC asked me how Debian would work these days, i 
> gave the new Netinstaller Adrian released another try.

Please invite anyone interested to Debian on m68k or other exotic architectures
to the #debian-68k and #debian-ports channels. I have the impression that there
are lots of people interested in Linux on such machines, but not many are aware
we're working on the support for these.

> While looking at the kernel output at boot i saw that my Network card
> is indeed supported (i thought it wasn't until 2 days ago!). It only
> needed the MAC address to be set manually, then the eth0 came up.
> This is more a firmwar bug of the "EtherNAT" network card that has no
> MAC adress default.

Yes, MAC addresses are normally set in the firmware. You might be able
to reprogram your network card's firmware chip to fix the issue.

> So Adrian added the pata_falcon module to the initramfs and installation
> can begin. The D-I works really well! When the network failed, i went to
> a second console brought up the network manually and let D-I retry DHCP.
> 
> Then after choosing the right (thx Adrian) ftp mirror and subfolder
> installation was quite easy.

There is a patch by "JH Chatenet" for the debian-installer component
"choose-mirror" to address this issue. Unfortunately, KiBI (d-i maintainer)
didn't agree on merging the patch yet until similar work was done for
Debian Backports.

Maybe I'll have a look at the patch and merge it myself.

> Adrian showed me how to  set the mac address at boot time, so now the
> network is up automatically.

For the record, this can be easily achieved using systemd-networkd
using the "MACAdress" directive in the [Link] section, see:

> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd-networkd

> I installed the ssh so one can even log in remotely. Installing stuff
> with apt works flawless.
> 
> 
> The intalled Debian has atm two problems
> 
> -keyboard (de layout) work ok for usual letters and numbers, also those
> that need the shift modifier, but many important characters like ~ @ | and [ 
> ] cannot be typed on the Atari
> 
> -xserver crashes
> 
> I'd need help with that. I'll append the dmesg.txt and xorg.log files.
> Let me know if you want more logfiles or remote access.

FWIW, during the last meetup in 2015 we had, you actually had X.Org running
on your Atari Falcon using the fbdev driver, although you might have used
a different graphics card back then. Either way, X worked.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Stefan Niestegge]

Am 10.02.2018 um 03:01 schrieb Michael Schmitz:


xserver needs support for the Atari pixel format (interleaved planes).
Shouldn't be too hard to do, but Xorg code probably isn't for the faint
of heart (I've certainly had enough to last me a lifetime).



video=atafb:keep (and choose 320x200 16 bit on Falcon)

boot debian

startx

https://photos.app.goo.gl/iE4MZbvLyMQsxO2x1

:-)

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Stefan Niestegge]

Hello Michael,


Am 10.02.2018 um 03:01 schrieb Michael Schmitz:

Hello Stefan,

what's wrong with the old falcon IDE driver? pata_falcon should not be
necessary, and may even be detrimental to performance (it doesn't use
interrupts, rather it polls for completion of ATA commands).


Probably nothing wrong with it, but with the kernel from the netinstall
iso no IDE was detected at all. A module was needed to be loaded and
pata_falcon was tried at first, and was successful. After the installer
installed to /dev/sda3 it made no sense to modprobe falconide that would
create /dev/hda nodes.


The EtherNAT will remember the MAC address across reboots, but some hack
to set a fixed address after module load might be in order. My EtherNAT
is toast so I can't test that myself.


Perhaps i can take a look at your EtherNAT if you attend to m68k meetup.
i revived a broken EtherNAT by simply reprogramming the FPGA.


The console keyboard map is for american layout: @ is on shift-2, ~ is
on shift-~, | is on shift-#, [ is on ü, ] is on + (curly brackets on
shift with same keys) with my german layout keyboard. No idea why I used
the american layout, I'm sure I had taken down the german raw keycodes
at some stage when rewriting the keyboard driver.


i choosed german keyboard at D-I setup and shift-2 is ", shift-~ is °
shift-# is ' ...


If these keys don't work for you, try without loading a key map.


will try to figure that out.


xserver needs support for the Atari pixel format (interleaved planes).
Shouldn't be too hard to do, but Xorg code probably isn't for the faint
of heart (I've certainly had enough to last me a lifetime).


so, remove Xorg and install old XFree86?

hmm. my supervidel supports 8-bit chunky as well as 16 bit (compatible
to the Falcon 320x200 "truecolor". we could also give Xorg what it
needs to be happy.

Greetings,
Stefan

Re: Trying the netinstall again on Atari Falcon

[Michael Schmitz]

Hello Stefan,

what's wrong with the old falcon IDE driver? pata_falcon should not be
necessary, and may even be detrimental to performance (it doesn't use
interrupts, rather it polls for completion of ATA commands).

The EtherNAT will remember the MAC address across reboots, but some hack
to set a fixed address after module load might be in order. My EtherNAT
is toast so I can't test that myself.

The console keyboard map is for american layout: @ is on shift-2, ~ is
on shift-~, | is on shift-#, [ is on ü, ] is on + (curly brackets on
shift with same keys) with my german layout keyboard. No idea why I used
the american layout, I'm sure I had taken down the german raw keycodes
at some stage when rewriting the keyboard driver.

If these keys don't work for you, try without loading a key map.

xserver needs support for the Atari pixel format (interleaved planes).
Shouldn't be too hard to do, but Xorg code probably isn't for the faint
of heart (I've certainly had enough to last me a lifetime).

Cheers,

Michael


Am 10.02.2018 um 13:51 schrieb Stefan Niestegge:
> Hello list,
> 
> since someone on #atari-home IRC asked me how Debian would work these
> days, i gave the new Netinstaller Adrian released another try.
> 
> While looking at the kernel output at boot i saw that my Network card
> is indeed supported (i thought it wasn't until 2 days ago!). It only
> needed the MAC address to be set manually, then the eth0 came up.
> This is more a firmwar bug of the "EtherNAT" network card that has no
> MAC adress default.
> 
> So Adrian added the pata_falcon module to the initramfs and installation
> can begin. The D-I works really well! When the network failed, i went to
> a second console brought up the network manually and let D-I retry DHCP.
> 
> Then after choosing the right (thx Adrian) ftp mirror and subfolder
> installation was quite easy.
> 
> Adrian showed me how to  set the mac address at boot time, so now the
> network is up automatically.
> 
> I installed the ssh so one can even log in remotely. Installing stuff
> with apt works flawless.
> 
> 
> The intalled Debian has atm two problems
> 
> -keyboard (de layout) work ok for usual letters and numbers, also those
> that need the shift modifier, but many important characters like ~ @ |
> and [ ] cannot be typed on the Atari
> 
> -xserver crashes
> 
> I'd need help with that. I'll append the dmesg.txt and xorg.log files.
> Let me know if you want more logfiles or remote access.
> 
> 
> greetings,
> Stefan "beetle" Niestegge