Copyright (C) 2000 Ingvar Hagelund,
Ringshusveien 10, N-1176 OSLO, NORWAY
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"Linux" is a registrated trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. "IBM" and "RS/6000" are trademarks owned by IBM Corporation. "MS-DOS" is a trademark owned by Microsoft Corporation.
Updated: June 29. 2000
This document is made after own experiences on a 43P 7248-133. The things I did might or might not work for you. You are on your own risk. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any damage, loss or expenses because of something you might have done because this document said so. If you want to give me feedback on errors, typos, or anything that can make this document better, please feel free to contact me by sending an e-mail to ingvar@unik.no
This document is about installing linuxppc-1999 on the IBM RS/6000 43P, model 7248. The methods described in this document may or may not work on other machines or models. They may or may not work on other Linux distributions. Don't ask me about this, as I have not tested others. Look at the resources page for other resources on this. If you find that these instructions work on other models or distributions, please let me know, and I'll add that info here.
A lot of people have asked me about installation of LinuxPPC-2000. This document does NOT cover the installation of LinuxPPC-2000. The developpers of LinuxPPC have abandonned the Text Based (Red Hat) installer in favour of the X based one, which requiers the Xpmac X-server. It is not possible to run the Xpmac X-server on the 7248, so it's not possible to run the installation program either. In april this year, the Carolina based workstations like the 7248 got a working X-server via a kernel frame buffer, so it's likely that future versions of LinuxPPC will install out-of-the-box. Until then, what you have to do is to install LinuxPPC-1999 following this guide, and then upgrade all packages to the ones used in LinuxPPC-2000.
NEWS!It's now possible to install LinuxPPC-2000 on the 7248 with the a frame buffer X server. I'm diving into it right now. If you want to experiment on you own, download this boot image, and hack away. I'm going to make an update to this document when finished. Fast intro: Boot, enter a shell, make small changes to lots of files to make the X installer work, or the more easy (maybe) way: just enter text_installer. partition your files with fdisk or cfdisk, mount all partitions under /tmp, add swap with swapon and enter the text based installer with command text_installer
Note that the 7248-132 and 43P-132 is two terms for the same model, and the same goes for 7248-133 and 43P-133. These four terms describes almost the exactly same model, with modifications so small, I have not been able to find them. You can safly assume that they are all the same machine.
If you are reading an offline version of this document, please note that the most up-to-date version can be found at http://www.ifi.uio.no/~ingvarha/43p
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The IBM RS/6000 43P model 7248-133 is a not extremely new PReP based PowerPC workstation which was produced from 1995 through 1997. The 43P series includes a lot of machines, both CHRP and PReP based. Our model has among other things this to offer:
Linux has now a native port to the PowerPC processor, and all official code is maintained in the main kernel tree. The main part of the port was done by Gary Thomas. The story of the port can be found here. For more information on running Linux on the PowerPC processor, check out the LinuxPPC homepage http://www.linuxppc.org.
The linuxppc-1999 distribution has no less than two installation programs included on the CD. Unfortunately, none of them works very well. The first is the "native" linuxppc installer, and it is made for Apple PowerMacs, and works therefore best on them. It is based on X, and does not work at all on the 7248. The second is the installer from Red Hat, and that's the one we are going to use.
We are actually not going to change much. The only problem is that the Red Hat installer LinuxPPC has patched and changed is a little buggy, and can not take care of everything that we need for this model. So, we have to do some of the configuration manually. Don't despair, this doucment will lead you through it, step by step.