[cobalt-users] Raq4 Software in Vmware Session

[Greg Boehnlein <damin@xxxxxxxx>]

[Disclaimer:] The following comments are provided for informational 
purposes only. Following any of these instructions will most certainly 
void your warranty from Sun, and probably violates the Raq4 software 
licensing agreement. I do NOT condone, nor reccomend that anyone attempt 
to do this, unless you have a high level of Linux experience and are 
willing to risk trashing your Raq. If you decide to do it and try to sell 
commercial access to clients, you are an evil person and I hope that Sun 
Cobalt will sue your pants off and throw you in the slammer!

Hello,
	Many of you have asked me how I was able to get the Raq4 software 
running in a Vmware session. Here are my notes on what needed to be 
changed to get the Raq4 software to boot and run on a standard PC. This 
disk image has been modified to run in a Vmware session. Information on Vmware 
can be found at http://www.vmware.com. Many people want to know why I did 
this. The simple answer is that I own and administer a large number of 
Cobalt RAQ units, and I need the ability to test software and security on 
the Cobalt OS in a non-production environment. Vmware's ability to have 
Un-doable disks allows me to do testing of software installs and security 
hacks without concern for a lengthy reload process. When I am done with my 
testing, I can opt to write all changes on the file-system back to the 
disk or discard them. Also, the ability to just "unzip and run" a new Raq 
for development purposes totally rocks. It is a lot faster to compile and 
build code on a 2 Ghz Vmware host system than to build and compile on a 
real Raq at 350 Mhz. I've had as many as 6 Raq images running at the same 
time on a single Linux server under Vmware workstation.

As such the following points need to be taken into consideration:

1. This box is running a RedHat 6.2 2.2.22 kernel release, installed via 
RPM. As such, the bwmgmt.o module that ships with Cobalt's Kernel will not 
load or work.

2. This image has been modified to run out of a single partition, instead 
of the Cobalt default. Therefore, certain things such as quotas MIGHT NOT 
WORK. I haven't had the opportunity to test it in detail and quite 
frankly, since I don't plan on running it for multiple user access, I 
don't care.

3. Since the Raq units have their own bootloading firmware, I have 
installed LILO.

4. All of the utils in the panel-utils RPM have been replaced with simple 
shell scripts. A PC does not have the Cobalt LCD and this was required to 
prevent the system from hanging when LCD calls or input was required. Here 
is a list of files that have been modified from that RPM:

S.5....T   /sbin/lcd-flash
S.5....T   /sbin/lcd-getip
S.5....T   /sbin/lcd-menu
S.5....T   /sbin/lcd-swrite
S.5....T   /sbin/lcd-write
S.5....T   /sbin/lcd-yesno
S.5....T   /sbin/lcdsleep
S.5....T   /sbin/lcdstart
S.5....T   /sbin/lcdstop
S.5....T   /sbin/link
S.5....T   /sbin/linkstatus
S.5....T   /sbin/readbutton
S.5....T   /sbin/ruleflush

5. Since the RAQ uses a serial console, /etc/inittab and /etc/securetty 
have been modified to put gettys where you would expect them and allow you 
to log in on 6 virtual consoles.

6. Vmware-Tools have been installed to improve performance in Vmware 
virtual sessions.

7. I had to correct for broken symlinks in /usr/include to get several 
packages to build correctly. This was simple:
cd /usr/include
rm -rf linux asm
ln -s ../src/linux/include/linux/ linux
ln -s ../src/linux/include/asm asm

Enjoy. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at 
damin@xxxxxxxxx

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