WinUAE/PPC with APUS Linux
 

Hi all, I thought I'd give APUS Linux a bash and see if it'll install. I did manage to get to the installer although that was a chore, having to use a picasso II+ card and clgen video mode for it to even get to the installer, anything else and it just complains it can't recognize the display. It initialized the swap and linux ext3 partitions without any trouble, but then when it came to installing the system, the problems started. Using the CDROM image it complains it cannot mount the rescue.bin floppy image, then it totally screws up as it can't unmount whatever it tried to mount previously and the cd-rom becomes inaccessible. So I made an adf of the rescue disk by mounting the boot partiton (amiga ffs) which had rescue.bin copied onto it, creating a HD adf floppy image and selecting it in df0 and then using: cat /target/boot/rescue.bin > /dev/fd0 to dump the image onto the emulated floppy. This worked in so far as it did indeed create the floppy properly, but, when selected during the installation, WinUAE freezes and has to be terminated by task manager. I'm continuing to play with it to see if I can get any other results. So far I've tried a A4000T config with the cyberstorm ppc/060 accelerator and a A1200 config with the blizzard ppc/060 accelerator, both with the same results. I have yet to try it with warp however, so maybe that'll be different? Just wondered if anyone else has tried this yet, and if you've had better luck? Cheers Bolt

Do you have a link to where to get the latest complete APUS image and kernels ?

Yeah, urls to exact same files are of course needed and exact steps to duplicate it.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post a link to another board where the steps are, but I can post the Debian links I believe as the distro is free to download.

CD Image
Kernel
Bootstrapper

I can't really post the WinUAE config as I've tried a lot of options mostly with the same result. Mainly, I've used a 4000T/PPC/060 config. 2MB chip ram with 128 MB accelerator ram, cyberstorm 44.71 rom.

DVD/CD-ROM placed on A4000T scsi controller unit 1 with the distro CD iso mounted.

Picasso II+ RTG

For the hard drive I made a HDF of 2GB with the 4000T internal scsi controller unit 0. Using HDToolBox I split this into 3 partitions, a small one at the start for AmigaOS, a large one in the middle for APUS root and a medium size one at the end for swap space. The root and swap were given 0x45585432 and 0x53574150 partition type IDs respectively. Also changed max transfer on each partition from 0xffffff to 0xffff.

Formatted up the AmigaOS partition and placed a minimal install for the PPC card. Using PUP, all I did here was to copy the PPC test disk image
PPC Test Disk
Onto the hard drive and edited the startup-sequence to remove the menu. Also copied a few vital commands from a workbench disk like dir, list, delete etc..

Then copied bootstrap, ppcboot_pup into C: and copied the kernel image to vmlinuz in dh0: and root.bin to dh0: (SYS:).

Launched the installer with:
bootstrap --apus -k dh0:vmlinuz -r dh0:root.bin 60nsram nobats video=clgen:mode:1024x768-60

Then the installer appears, and breaks at the point I mentioned previously. I'm still experimenting atm. I've tried a lot of different configs with no luck so far. Weirdly, changing the resolution in the mode parameter seems to have no effect, turning off the amiga display with video=amifb:off seems to crash the emulator.

I have no real purpose for this to be honest. I'm just curious if I can get it to work. Having a "native" PPC bsd environment could be useful to me as I mess around with old obsolete PPC set top cable TV boxes, converting them to media players.

Do you get same problem if you use mainboard IDE or A4000 + A4091? (A4000T hardware is very rare, A4000T SCSI driver may have bugs)

I've tried almost every permutation of configurations, A1200, A4000, A3000 with different HD controllers and they all seem to fail at the same point. Currently, I'm going to try a full OS3.1 install on the FFS partition and install the PPC stuff properly. Also going to install the Picasso drivers onto the OS3.1 and have the workbench in a picasso screen mode when I launch the bootstrapper, see if that changes anything,

TBH I haven't had so much fun for ages :) And great work on WinUAE 3 btw.

EDIT: From the tutorials I've seen elsewhere for installing APUS onto actual hardware it seems as though a working network adapter is required. Unfortunately, the APUS kernel used does not seem to support the A2065, although the bootstrapper does mention it will be reset on kernel startup. But the actual nix side doesn't recognize any installed network adapter. The readme in the bootstrapper archive is somewhat cryptic regarding the A2065 saying it's too 'plug and play'???. My exploration however continues.

EDIT 2: Solved the ethernet problem. Using the A2065 in SLIRP+NAT mode and appending the kernel option:
ether=eth0
to the end of the bootstrap parameters seems to allow the kernel to see and configure the network. Unfortunately this hasn't fixed the install problem :(

EDIT 3: YAY! I've got it to start instaling the base system. I had to mount the cd and hdf on different controllers. It's in the process of installing now if it works I'll post a video of the whole process if any one is interested :)

EDIT 4: I've now installed it and got it to boot up to a shell. I'm still a long way from an X/KDE desktop environment, but so far it's promising.

I've gotten APUS running nice now. Still only console based as nothing I do will allow X to start, something about the kernel scanning PCI first and thus never finding the RTG card. I also don't think the distro has a Cirrus driver.

I've installed a box with the same kernel and distro and managed to compile some stuff on the WinUAE side which worked on the box straight off. This considerably cuts down on the messing around I have to do at the development side. Ideally of course, compiling on the set-top-box itself would be best, but they have a very limited RAM, and storage is a small amount of flash ram, I can't even get the kernel headers on one and have enough room to do much else.

The absolute best solution would be to run an X session remotely. But I'm coming up against problems with the networking. The autoconfig of the network interface gives me 10.0.2.15 as an IP, I'm assuming this is done by WinUAE and acting as a NAT bridge. The issue here is that the Windows side of things cannot connect to a service running on the emulator. I've resolved this by writing an app for each side that tunnels the connections with the emulator side pushing the connection. This is obviously something that few people will ever need to do, so including this functionality in WinUAE directly is probably something that you wouldn't want to do. Just a thought tho'

Cheers,
Bolt

You can have listening services with slirp (Listening port mapped to host OS ip:port pair): http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=69712 (posts 24+).

What's APUS?

Ahh, I didn't know about that, that would have saved me some coding. lol
added line to config file:
slirp_redir=tcp:10022:22:10.0.2.15

And I can login an ssh session using 127.0.0.1:10022. Absolutely perfect, I'll probably enable raw telnet to tunnel the X session though, to cut down on CPU load.

Thanks Toni.
http://s7.postimg.org/k0uuwsobe/ssh.jpg


It's an Amiga/PPC distribution of Debian.

APUS means Amiga Power Up System

APUS Linux is the Debian distribution.

To be OCD about it, Debian Woody/Sarge are the distributions, they have several platform versions (e.g. x86, 68k) including PPC. In the PPC distributions are many sub-platforms for different PowerPC systems such as Macs etc.., one of these is APUS (for Amiga/PPC). The APUS kernel was not developed to version 2.6 which appears to limit the version usable on APUS to Sarge, I may get stuck into the latest kernel source and see what I can come up with however.

Could you attach your winuaelog.txt (enable logging checkbox in paths panel to create it) when you boot to ppc linux? Just want to confirm the config before doing any tests.

Sure, I've included my config file as well. This is the log from start up to the appearance of the linux login prompt.

Here's a file list dump of the amiga boot partition.
The startup-sequence
The install script
The linux startup script (after install)

I've got it to a desktop environment using Xming it's a tad slow, but I can try fine tuning it. Quite happy with this, I can run a development IDE now. *chuffed*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-YAfh5srJk


note: sorry for triple post

You really shouldn't be doing those things as root...

What is a Linux user doing on Windows? ;)

That was really cool, btw! I might give it a spin myself... (after installing Amix :D)

I don't think there's much to care about security on an emulated Amiga machine running a 12-years-old distribution ;)

So I run the risk of messing up an emulated test environment? It's no big deal.

(Still feeling a bit too lazy..)

Could you run installation with logging command line parameters ("winuae.exe -log -scsiemulog -scsilog"), when CD problem appears, wait 10 seconds more, quit winuae and attach the winuaelog.txt.

It must be some unknown SCSI emulation bug or missing feature.