Re: [cobalt-developers] Re: Install Red Hat

[Tim Hockin <thockin@xxxxxxx>]

Chris Adams wrote:

> Utter BS.  Red Hat Linux as shipped will work on anything 386 and up.
> You do however need to make sure that if you remove the hard drive to do
> the install you stick it in a similar type system (in other words, an
> AMD K6 based system).  The Red Hat Linux installer will install a kernel
> and C library (and some other things sometimes) optimized for the system
> on which it is being installed.  So, if you stick that hard drive in a
> Pentium III, you'll get a PIII kernel and glibc (and some other packages

Aha!  This was what was not conveyed to me.  The install 'auto-detects' the
system-type.  Ick.

> Another problem is the fact that a RaQ does not boot like a PC.  There
> is no BIOS on a RaQ to load LILO like there is on a PC.  Instead, the
> RaQ reads the first partition (hda1) filesystem directly and loads
> vmlinux.gz from the root of that filesystem.  So, hda1 needs a file 

Note also that vmlinux.gz is a gzipped vmlinux, and NOT a zImage or a
bzImage.

> A third problem is that proper support for Cobalt x86 based RaQs was not
> in the standard kernel until recently IIRC (RaQs don't have a normal PC

Still not fully integrated - one piece at a time.  At this rate we'll be on
2.6 before everything that might be acepted is accepted.  There will always
be things that won't get accepted for various reasons.  <shrug>


-- 
Tim Hockin
Systems Software Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Cobalt Server Appliances
thockin@xxxxxxx