WinUAE/PPC with APUS

Boltar · 22 December 2014, 01:08

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

Michael · 22 December 2014, 08:10

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

Toni Wilen · 22 December 2014, 08:23

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

Boltar · 22 December 2014, 14:28

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.

Toni Wilen · 22 December 2014, 14:43

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

Boltar · 22 December 2014, 15:00

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.

Boltar · 23 December 2014, 13:02

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

Toni Wilen · 23 December 2014, 13:21

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+).

B14ck W01f · 23 December 2014, 14:14

What's APUS?

Boltar · 23 December 2014, 14:19

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by B14ck W01f

What's APUS?

It's an Amiga/PPC distribution of Debian.

thomas · 23 December 2014, 14:51

APUS means Amiga Power Up System

APUS Linux is the Debian distribution.

Boltar · 23 December 2014, 14:56

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.

Toni Wilen · 23 December 2014, 15:02

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.

Boltar · 23 December 2014, 15:11

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

Boltar · 23 December 2014, 15:39

Here's a file list dump of the amiga boot partition.

Code:

Trashcan                     Dir ----rwed Yesterday 20:33:07
Trashcan.info               1172 ----rw-d Yesterday 20:33:07
S                            Dir ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:47
C                            Dir ----rwed Yesterday 20:38:32
ENV                          Dir ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
Libs                         Dir ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
root.bin                 1474560 ----rwed Yesterday 20:38:38
vmlinuz                  1068153 ----rwed Yesterday 20:38:55
install                      103 -s--rw-d Yesterday 20:47:45
first.b.preserved           1024 -------d 26-Nov-01 05:16:27
second.b.preserved         41680 -------d 26-Nov-01 05:16:27
linux                         83 -s--rw-d Today     01:36:18
hdd.txt                      588 ----rwed Today     14:32:17
first.b                     1024 -------d 07-Apr-05 18:24:18
second.b                   54760 -------d 07-Apr-05 18:24:18
10 files - 5 directories - 5190 blocks used

Directory "Trashcan" is empty

Directory "S" on Tuesday 23-Dec-14
startup-sequence              28 ----rw-d Yesterday 20:34:47
P                             50 -s--rw-d Yesterday 20:34:17
W                             55 -s--rw-d Yesterday 20:34:17
3 files - 6 blocks used

Directory "C" on Tuesday 23-Dec-14
Execute                     4432 ----rwed Yesterday 20:36:05
Assign                      3220 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
PPCInstall                   268 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
PPCInstall.doc               367 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
ppctest                     8460 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
SetPatch                   14868 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
warptest                    4684 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
copy                        5580 ----rwed Yesterday 20:35:30
delete                      1972 ----rwed Yesterday 20:35:47
dir                         3440 ----rwed Yesterday 20:35:53
ed                         25044 ----rwed Yesterday 20:35:58
list                        5108 ----rwed Yesterday 20:36:16
makedir                      464 ----rwed Yesterday 20:36:27
protect                     1300 ----rwed Yesterday 20:36:35
rename                      1140 ----rwed Yesterday 20:36:43
type                        1496 ----rwed Yesterday 20:36:57
bootstrap                  46956 ----rwed Yesterday 20:38:25
ppcboot_pup                38027 ----rwed Yesterday 20:38:32
18 files - 351 blocks used

Directory "ENV" on Tuesday 23-Dec-14
powerpc                      Dir ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
1 directory - 2 blocks used

Directory "ENV/powerpc" on Tuesday 23-Dec-14
terminator                     1 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
1 file - 2 blocks used

Directory "Libs" on Tuesday 23-Dec-14
ppcdiss.library            61820 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
warp.library               21288 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
warpHW.library              1396 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:17
68040.library                748 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:18
68040new.library           86276 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:18
68060.library             103636 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:18
powerpc.library           111044 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:18
ppc.library               162700 ----rwed Yesterday 20:34:19
amigaguide.library         22020 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:39
asl.library                40944 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
bullet.library             28960 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
commodities.library         8644 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
datatypes.library          15592 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
diskfont.library           15340 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
iffparse.library            6832 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
locale.library             18072 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
lowlevel.library            6920 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
mathieeedoubbas.library     5240 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
mathieeedoubtrans.library   16584 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
mathieeesingtrans.library   10428 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
mathtrans.library           4280 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
nonvolatile.library         3588 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
realtime.library            3980 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
rexxsupport.library         2524 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
rexxsyslib.library         33392 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
version.library              272 ----rwed Yesterday 20:37:40
26 files - 1586 blocks used

TOTAL: 58 files - 6 directories - 7137 blocks used

The startup-sequence

Code:

SetPatch QUIET
stack 40000

The install script

Code:

bootstrap --apus -k dh0:vmlinuz -r dh0:root.bin root=/dev/ram 60nsram nobats video=clgen:mode:1024x768-64 ether=eth0

The linux startup script (after install)

Code:

bootstrap --apus -k dh0:vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 60nsram nobats video=clgen:mode:1024x768-64 ether=eth0

Boltar · 24 December 2014, 02:17

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*

[ Show youtube player ]

note: sorry for triple post

Hewitson · 24 December 2014, 08:39

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

jbenam · 24 December 2014, 10:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boltar

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*

[ Show youtube player ]

note: sorry for triple post

What is a Linux user doing on Windows?

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

)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hewitson

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

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

Boltar · 24 December 2014, 13:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hewitson

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

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

Toni Wilen · 24 December 2014, 19:10

(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.

22 December 2014, 01:08	#1
Boltar Registered User Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: UK Posts: 18	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 Last edited by Boltar; 23 December 2014 at 15:46.

22 December 2014, 15:00	#6
Boltar Registered User Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: UK Posts: 18	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. Last edited by Boltar; 22 December 2014 at 20:36.

23 December 2014, 14:56	#12
Boltar Registered User Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: UK Posts: 18	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. Last edited by Boltar; 23 December 2014 at 15:28.

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22 December 2014, 08:10	#2
Michael A1260T/PPC/BV/SCSI/NET Join Date: Jan 2013 Location: Moscow / Russia Posts: 840	Do you have a link to where to get the latest complete APUS image and kernels ?

22 December 2014, 08:23	#3
Toni Wilen WinUAE developer Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Hämeenlinna/Finland Age: 49 Posts: 26,553	Yeah, urls to exact same files are of course needed and exact steps to duplicate it.

22 December 2014, 14:28	#4
Boltar Registered User Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: UK Posts: 18	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.

22 December 2014, 14:43	#5
Toni Wilen WinUAE developer Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Hämeenlinna/Finland Age: 49 Posts: 26,553	Do you get same problem if you use mainboard IDE or A4000 + A4091? (A4000T hardware is very rare, A4000T SCSI driver may have bugs)

23 December 2014, 13:02	#7
Boltar Registered User Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: UK Posts: 18	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

23 December 2014, 13:21	#8
Toni Wilen WinUAE developer Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Hämeenlinna/Finland Age: 49 Posts: 26,553	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+).

23 December 2014, 14:14	#9
B14ck W01f m68k all the way Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Koalaland Posts: 523	What's APUS?

23 December 2014, 14:51	#11
thomas Registered User Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Germany Posts: 7,024	APUS means Amiga Power Up System APUS Linux is the Debian distribution.

23 December 2014, 15:02	#13
Toni Wilen WinUAE developer Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Hämeenlinna/Finland Age: 49 Posts: 26,553	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.

24 December 2014, 02:17	#16
Boltar Registered User Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: UK Posts: 18	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 [ Show youtube player ] note: sorry for triple post

24 December 2014, 08:39	#17
Hewitson Registered User Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Melbourne, Australia Age: 41 Posts: 3,773	You really shouldn't be doing those things as root...

24 December 2014, 19:10	#20
Toni Wilen WinUAE developer Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Hämeenlinna/Finland Age: 49 Posts: 26,553	(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.

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