Re: [cobalt-users] Re: Cobalt Wish List

[Greg Boehnlein <damin@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Doug Carter wrote:

> 
> Greg,
> 
> This is a nice wish list, but everyone is going to have their own
> "pet" feature they'd like added. I'd rather see maximum effort put 
> into only one feature. IMHO, the first feature on the list must be:
> 
> 	- Installable on standard PC hardware
> 
> Once that's complete, the other features will follow as necessity
> dictates.

All we need to do is hack the OS Restore CD to disable all of the Bios 
checking crap (to determine if it is a Cobalt unit), disable all of the 
garbage code for the LCD display and rebuilt the ISO. I got about 50% 
through that in 2002 before I found out I was going to be a daddy and lost 
the ability to spend time on the project.

Now that we have the freedom to do whatever the hell we want, this should 
be a 2-3 week project.

It has been a while.. BUT...

The Raq (2,3,4,xtr,550) issues a BOOTP request to the system running the 
OSRCD, which then assigns it an IP address. The RAQ then TFTPs a kernel 
image and boots it. The root filesystem is mounted from the OSRCD via 
NFS (NFSROOT capability) and proceeds with the installation.

So.. to install from the OSRCD, we need a boot floppy/cd combination 
with a kernel that:

1. Supports BOOTP
2. Supports NFS and Root on NFSBuild in support for NFS and root over NFS
3. Supports a ton of Network Cards
4. Supports SGI XFS

Then, we need to rip out all the "silly" stuff in the Cobalt installer 
that attempts to verify what Cobalt product you are running and what BIOS 
we are running, replacing it with a simple Text Based menu allowing the 
user to choose (after all, a PC that is the target of the restore will 
have a Video card, Keyboard and Monitor hooked up.. why not let the user 
choose some options? I.E. Ext3 vs. XFS... Partition sizes.. Software RAID 
options etc..)

Once that is done, we handle the install as normal.

We'll need to add logic into the entire Cobalt boot process to determine 
wether or not the LCD is present (or if this is a REAL Cobalt unit or not) 
as there is no LCD on a PC, so all of that stuff breaks pretty badly. See 
the following post for an explanation of what I had to do to get the Raq4 
booting in Vmware.

http://list.cobalt.com/pipermail/cobalt-users/2003-January/085357.html

This isn't a difficult project.. just takes someone getting into the 
install logic (with better Perl skills than I) and figuring out what does 
what, where, when and how.

Vmware is invaluable for this! :) My goal was to get a custom OSRCD built 
that would allow me to restore into a Vmware session a fresh Raq550 image.

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