Dom's Web Site | Computing | Adrastea (IBM 43P RS6000)

Update April 2004

Sadly after several years of reliable service at my mum's house as an Internet gateway, my RS6000 has died with major-sounding SCSI controller errors. I might be able to resurrect it when have time and physical access, but I don't know when that will be.

Intro

This page is written to hopefully help people who are trying to install linux on one of these beasts. There is hardly any content here, just a couple of links to sites I found useful and a deb of a 2.2 kernel that Works For Me (tm) (and also a boot disk which may be useful).

Note that the information below mostly relates to a particular model of the RS/6000 dating from 1995-97.

The information on this page is up-to-date as of the time at the bottom of the page.

Disclaimer

As usual, anything that goes wrong based on this page or any linked files is Not My Fault.

Basic installation

I chose to install debian, since I am familiar with it and it's one of the more mainstream distros to support PPC.

I roughly followed the instructions at http://adequat.c2a.fr/linux/howtos/rs6000/, except that I didn't bother installing yaboot - for the time being at least I am just dd'ing the kernel onto /dev/sda1 (my PReP boot partition).

I then dist-upgraded to woody (as I write, woody = testing)

XFree86

Not yet played with X, see the other docs for information

Kernel

Unfortunately the PPC port is mainly geared towards Apple Macs, and a few patches are required to the vanilla kernel (including support for the E15 framebuffer). See http://www.amberdata.demon.co.uk/carolina/ for more details, or use local copies if necessary: carolina.diff.gz (patch against 2.2.18); ibm_e15fb.diff.gz (patch for E15 framebuffer).

Also, 2.2.19 won't compile at all, as far as I can tell.

I'm currently running a 2.2.20 kernel on adrastea with the main patch and the E15 patch from the above site (drivers/video/Config.in needs to be patched manually, you'll see the broken bits appear in a .rej file). The following related files are available relating to this (but see also the next section):

Current - 2.2.21

Note that this kernel/modules contains all the stuff you need for a masquerading gateway since that's what my box is now doing. It also has some IPV6 patches.

kernel-image-2.2.21+caro+e15+ipv6fixes_adrastea.1_powerpc.deb - deb of 2.2.21 kernel/modules as below
config-2.2.21+caro+e15+ipv6fixes - kernel config used

Old - 2.2.20

kernel-image-2.2.20+caro+e15_adrastea.3_powerpc.deb - deb of the my current kernel/modules (you need to run debian to use this)
config-2.2.20 - kernel config used
vmlinuz-2.2.20 - The raw kernel image. This will most likely not be very useful on its because it doesn't have an ethernet driver compiled in (as I'm using modules). The deb above includes those modules. For a kernel to initially boot the system, see the linuxdoc HOWTO page (linked below). Or, use this boot disk.

2.2.20-pre10

Note: Old, use stuff above in preference.

kernel-image-2.2.20pre10caro_adrastea.1_powerpc.deb - deb of the my current kernel/modules (you need to run debian to use this)
config-2.2.20pre10 - kernel config used
vmlinuz-2.2.20pre10caro - The raw kernel image. This will most likely not be very useful on its because it doesn't have an ethernet driver compiled in (as I'm using modules). The deb above includes those modules. For a kernel to initially boot the system, see the linuxdoc HOWTO page (linked below).

Specs

These are the details I have managed to obtain about my machine. It may help you decide if my kernel package is suitable. See also the output of dmesg on my box.

IBM RS 6000 (7248-133)
PowerPC PReP 133 MHz
32 MB RAM
2 GB Fast-5 SCSI disk
Integrated 10Mbit ethernet (PCNet)
cs4248 soundcard
ncr53c8xx SCSI controller
NE2000 PCI clone NIC

System Management services

Some of the firmware options need a special boot disk - as it's likely that someone might not have a copy, I've put up an image here: sysmanage.img. This can be dd'ed to a 1.44 MB floppy and booted on the 43P (no idea if it works for anything else).

Feedback

Get in touch if you have anything to add or correct. Thanks.