Need help making a decision

[quotaholic]

Thanks Ahau, I was wondering what tools were being used in those scripts. Well think I made a swing and a miss. After repacking and watching init hang, with many question marks, I remember that my /lib/modules folder did not have a /kernel/drivers/net subfolder. Crossed my fingers running depmod that the old /kernel/drivers/net/* would be okay. Guess not. So I think I am heading back to the drawing board on a kernel reconfig. This time though I will make a 4000 meg save.dat on a 16gb sd card to boot the netbook to so that the instructions are more vanilla to follow. That way I will have fewer mounted devices and fewer opportunities to fopah. That and the instructions will be letter for letter.

Thanks again, out for the weekend. Hope everyone has a great holiday!
quotaholic

[brokenman]

To unpack on slackware (providing you have squashfs support)

unsquashfs -f -dest /path/to/unpack /path/to/module.xzm
mksquashfs directory module.xzm

You can download the squashfs tools and stick them in your $PATH.

[quotaholic]

Help,

I just failed for the third time in a row. Have yet to produce something that boots based off the instructions here:

http://porteus.org/info/docs/51-develop ... ernel.html

There is one spot where I needed to loose the .xz extension to off the end of the command in order to rebuild the initrd.xz in /root. Other than that I had no luck unmounting the /mnt/cdrom initrd image. Kept getting device busy no matter what I closed or tried. Other that that all indications looked good.

I am hanging at 2.358310 kernel thread helper. Third time in a row. Any ideas?

Thanks
quotaholic

[fanthom]

there is one mistake:

Code: Select all

xz --check=crc32 --x86 --lzma2 /root/initrd.xz

should be

Code: Select all

xz --check=crc32 --x86 --lzma2 /root/initrd

to umount /mnt/cdrom you muse exit this folder so do:
cd /

BTW: Porteus kernel has all important parts compiled in (*) so if you dont make any major twekas than you could skip initrd part. with current config the ramdisk is important from PXE-boot point of view only.
in short words: you can use original initrd.xz with your own kernel.

[quotaholic]

That is seriously good information for me at this stage. Thank you. I will try again with out initrd.xz.

I tried out rc-2 last night. It would not boot on amd geode hardware. Indications were that I needed a cpu with pae support. I am not sure if that was intentional or not as Porteus makes a great embedded os.

Also, for whatever reason I cant get any usb keyboard input to take on init when asked the "do you want to make a save.dat file when booting the target hardware to the sd card holding Porteus RC-1. If I take that sd card back to my netbook I have no problem answering the question and continuing init. Seems like a usb thing. I am using a powered usb hub and a basic logitech keyboard. Have swapped out hubs and keyboards just to make sure. Is there any way to bypass the save.dat question?

Say I am building the kernel on a netbook using a 4000mb save.dat to hold all the kernel stuff. When I go to transfer to the target hardware can I effectively leave behind that 4000mb save.dat

Not 100 percent sure but it seems like some cheat codes dont work on RC-1. "toroot" plops me in kdm. I am going to download a fresh iso. Too many things seem out of place.

**Edit: MD5 sums check out. Not sure why usb keyboard is not working in init. Same on "toroot" cheatcode.

Thanks again
quotaholic

[Ahau]

RC2 came out with a kernel that supported PAE (previous version did not). This is the second (third?) time we've heard this problem... I'm thinking PAE won't be in the kernel for final (but, I don't make those decisions )

[fanthom]

"Indications were that I needed a cpu with pae support."
yes - this is my fault. will be corrected for FINAL.

[quotaholic]

Excellent. Think I made a mistake along the way on one or more of my attempts. I really need to name this kernel in the same context that porteus has, no? With the -porteus appended to the version or uname? Also when in makeconfig I see a default size for ramdisk. Should I adjust the default size or is the default okay? Just trying to eliminate possibilities of fail.

quotaholic

[fanthom]

@quotaholic
1) you can pick up any name for your kernel. just remember to have the same name in /mnt/cdrom/lib/modules/2.6.38.x-your_name
2) you should change initrd size in kernel config only if you resize initrd itself. if you just replace a files inside intird then you are fine. remember to leave more than 600KB of free space in the ramdisk.

Cheers

[quotaholic]

Thanks for the quick reply Fanthom! I am actually trying to bypass the xinitrd portion for now. Call it training wheels if you will however this is my first kernel compile and I am on attempt number 8 or so now. Once I get one that works I will try the initrd step too.

Hey on a completely unrelated note is anyone here playing back 1080p content on an ati driver? Tried to build a htpc on slackware and omg its soo much faster than *buntu's. Cant get 1080p working well though. My thread:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=102863

Thanks
quotaholic

Posted after 1 hour 17 minutes 23 seconds:
Just tried the same kernel that shipped in rc-2. 2.6.38.7

I even appended -porteus to the end.

I followed this guide:

http://porteus.org/info/docs/51-develop ... ernel.html

and nine times now I have had either a bunch of question marks (when initrd portion is followed) and init hangs,
or
I get kernel panic after vmlinux is loaded, a 303 unknown video mode error results, and initrd hangs causing led blinking. I get this if I skip the initrd part of the tutorial. This is what prompted me to ask about appending porteus to the kernel and version.

I can produce either situation with regularity and consistency. I have to ask, before I attempt try number 10 has someone been though this tutorial and proven it to work? Are there little bits of key information that are missing that a vetran would know about that a newb would not? I linked to my website and my last xbmc tutorial to try to prove that I am not a complete idiot. Granted I am not all that smart but I do know a little about linux and how to follow instructions. I am one try away from giving up and throwing in the towel on porteus. I cant use either distro as it stands. RC-1 does not recognize a usb keyboard plugged in to a legacy 1.1 port on boot and RC-2 needs a pae kernel. And I cant make your "how to" work in compiling the hardware support I need in to your os.

Can someone validate the linked instructions and offer some plausible explanation as to why they produce so many failed builds or where I may be going wrong? Letter by letter I follow the same each time.

[brokenman]

I get this if I skip the initrd part of the tutorial.
You need to complete the initrd part and also the 000-kernel module must be updated (if using Porteus). They all interact together during boot.

I have step-by-step guide that i wrote for myself when i was having trouble which i can provide for you.

http://www.porteus.org/tmp/kernel-updat ... s-full.txt

[quotaholic]

Ahhh, This is what I needed. Thank you! In scanning the first 20 lines I already see a few commands that were not in this tutorial:

http://porteus.org/info/docs/51-develop ... ernel.html

Once I saw initrd getting mounted as a block device I figured that there was a three way handshake going on. Your text file does a much better job of explaining how to work with initrd.

Thanks again. I'll report back later tonight after I make some time to try this out.

quotaholic

[Ahau]

If this works out for you, I'll go through and try to merge the two documents, to get a more thorough HOWTO up on the website.

[fanthom]

@quotaholic
take simplest path at the beginning:
- forget about tweaking initrd and use one provided with rc2. as i said earlier: initrd is important only in case of doing pxe-boot, all "vital" parts are build into porteus kernel.
- use original porteus kernel config
try to bump kernel from 2.6.38.x to 2.6.38.8. in case of successful booting you can start playing with initrd and config.

Good luck!

[quotaholic]

@Fanthom,

Man am I happy to see your post. I was just about to ask what I should be copying over. I built in-kernel support for two of the three possibilities on wifi. Via (non-gpl or very recently gpl) makes the third so I will have to build that in later. Looking at the instructions I didnt have those particular modules in my lib/modules/..... folder. Wasn't sure what to copy over. It would be a pleasure to bypass initrd. In the future though it would be cool to know what has to be in there.

I did in fact go up to 2.6.38.8 as I saw it was the closest to the current "testing" kernel. Assumed it was a bug fix upstream. With initrd put aside I should be testing in just a few minutes.

Thank you!
quotaholic