Amithlon Setup Guide

[SnkBitten]

A little more progress.....but still not there.

[SnkBitten]

Another step forward...booting but no CDRom. It's reading the HD I configured while using Kernel 3.10. However once it boots to AmigaOS I get the popup "Can't load cdrom.device" or something like that. Haven't tested anything else, but it's nice to be up and running on the workbench!

Apparently I left out a few IDE devices. Added in and it boots. Now I need to fix the CDrom problem.

[huepper]

Nice to see.

[huepper]

...

found the files i'm searchin

[SnkBitten]

Compiled Milanca's Kernel4 and was able to boot my virtual box up using smallird.gz. Haven't figured out the Cdrom issue yet but I'll keep working on it.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by huepper

Anyone got these files?
Specially the patch files?
Links are broken.

Yes, on my site under kernel sources.

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/files/source/

[huepper]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

...
Brief search you can try this, no guarantee but it may get you close.

1920 x 1080 Desired Resolution (Visible area)
Interlace/Doublescan
2200 1125 Frame size (Whole line/frame)
0 0 Border size
88 4 Position (Front Porch)
44 5 Sync Size (Sync pulse)
? ? Sync Polarity
? 60

Screen refresh rate 60 Hz
Vertical refresh ? kHz
Pixel frequency 148.5 MHz
Sync Polarity - Checked is Negative, unchecked is Positive

Yeah man, this works for me.
I have a nice FullHD (1920x1080x32) Workbench running.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by huepper

Yeah man, this works for me.
I have a nice FullHD (1920x1080x32) Workbench running.

Great, now I know what to use when I get a new 1080p monitor and stop sharing my windows PC monitor (PC on dvi and Amiga on VGA).

[slartibartfass]

Hello everybody,
Great things happen. Thanks snkbitten for your work on amithlon.
My box works. It is a K8N neo2 with GF4ti AGP, 8139 NIC, SB live and a VIA USB card. The onboard devices didnt work less or more. Kernel4 didnt work - pciinsmod gave a general error, but kernel310 works - only VGA, not DVI, but okay.

To view videos from NAS i use ffplay and its not perfect. Tried Ramithlon and video graphics run better but sound is only some kind of whisteling. Has someone else got issues with Ramithlon and ffplay?

Regards
slartibartfass

[SnkBitten]

Had some issues with compiling so I started over on the kernel. I have CDRom working so whatever I missed is in there now.

Having issues with kernel modules, haven't spent any time looking at milanca's pci_modules text file, but I've compiled the modules and trying to insmod a specific one gives me "couldn't find/create /insmod on linuxside" Error code:1

So I'm curious if I've missed something else in the kernel.

Virtualbox makes this stuff quick to work with. Throw up a linux VM, extract the sources, compile, pull it over to a .iso image file and copy it to the VM amithlon and test it out. Both Linux and Amithlon virtuals running so I can go back and do another compile, etc...

I need to build another Amithlon VM that I can play with that hasn't been tweaked with kernel 3.10 and it's drivers....or any other customizing done to it.

Once I have a better grasp of what I'm doing and the steps I'll try to do a guide for compiling the kernel as well.

[huepper]

Originally Posted by slartibartfass

... Kernel4 didnt work - pciinsmod gave a general error, but kernel310 works - only VGA, not DVI, but okay.

...

Regards
slartibartfass

Moin,

have you changed the boot options for kernel4?
This is my line in isolinux.cfg:

default kernel4 init=/linuxrc console_level=0 root=/dev/ram1 initrd=bigird.gz vga=791 mem=512 ramdisk_size=14010 leavepages=9000

I think for DVI you must add at the end of the line

flatpanel=1

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by huepper

Is there an howto building an amithlon kernel?
What software is needed and which linux distribution is the best for that?

Have an older laptop which i can use only for work on kernel,
bigird.gz an such things.
But i'm also a "newbie".

Here's what I used.

Centos 3.9 i386 https://mirror.hmc.edu/centos/3/isos/i386/

You'll need to edit the config file /etc/yum.conf for where the sources/updates are pulled from, as the official mirrors don't have this old version still live.

use the same site as above....replacing the default http://mirror.something.com/centos/$kernelversion with https://mirror.hmc.edu/centos/3/os, addons, extras, etc...

then
su -c 'rpm --import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-3'

sudo yum update

and install the updates.

This version of CentOS 3.9 has the appropriate GCC version and supporting files.

I used milanca' linux-2.4.37.9-amithlon tree as trying to run his diff against linux-2.4.37.9 ended with an "unexpected end" or something like that.

Had to run make config and follow along his diff file changes to select the same options.

Once I had it compiling I just copied the entire directory so I can work in the copy directory and then if I screw up too badly I can just go back to the working one and repeat.

I really wouldn't worry about bigird.gz. It's only purpose is to get you started, once you have your HD configured under AmigaOS and bootable, you should switch to smallird.gz as you don't need the embedded "amithlon_hd" partition in bigird.gz.

As for smallird.gz, I've pulled the kickstart ROM out, patched it and added the PowerWindowsNG stuff and then put it back in smallird.gz. Very similar to I believe what Charlie did on his smallird.gz. It appears to be a A2000 kickstart, I swapped in a A4000 kickstart for fun and it would "emulator crash" on boot.

[SnkBitten]

I found a guide for patching the kickstart ROM in smallird.gz so after following along (and making adjustments) I thought I'd share.

PatchAmithlonRom.pdf

I tried to clean it up and make it more readable than the .pdf magazine format it was in (original - http://www.aug.org.au/augmag/WB_February_2003.pdf)

[SnkBitten]

Can anyone NOT using the kernels I've hosted who is running kernel 3.10 do the following on their Amithlon system in the shell.

xcat /proc/version

and let me know what version is listed. Mine lists as 3.00-test1 or similar. I'm curious if this "is" kernel 3.10 or if someone mislabeled an earlier test version that I found.

EDIT**
It's possible Gary didn't update the text to display the newer version. I pulled open Charlies included kernel archive and it included a readme for 3.10 with some specified updates over 3.00. I copied that over to my VM and once booted it reported the same version I already had (which is just a line of text in one of the .c files). I have the 3.00 source, anyone have the 3.1 source?

[huepper]

I think only Gary have this source.

[Methanoid]

What about Milanca's code?

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

What about Milanca's code?

Sources to Milanca's kernel 4 and Gary's kernel 3.00_test1 are available on my site. I haven't attempted a compile on Gary's or the original (CD) sources.

[Methanoid]

If I had half a brain I would look into the Diff files and updating Milanca's kernel to even newer Linux kernel

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

If I had half a brain I would look into the Diff files and updating Milanca's kernel to even newer Linux kernel

I only have about a 1/4 of a brain unfortunately.

[SnkBitten]

Wow...my first post in this thread was September 9th, 2015, having issues getting Amithlon installed on one of my old PCs (which a few days prior to that was the first I had heard of Amithlon).