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| Aleph ARMLinux (Debian 2.2) for RISC OS FAQ |
This FAQ is maintained by Aleph One. There is also a FAQ in the documentation maintained by Peter Naulls which may well contain more/better/different questions and answers. Check that out if you don't find the answer you wanted here.
Q: When I use !Partman on my ADFS drive it doesn't show the right Filecore partition size.
A: If the drive was ever formatted for IDEFS then !Partman will identify this partition table. If you are now using it on ADFS then the IDFES partition table is no longer relevant. You can tell !Partman to use the Linux/Filecore partition scheme instead of 'Autodetect', but a more permanent solution is to delete the IDEFS partition table using 'WIPEPART' suplied in Utils.APDL on the CD.
Q: When I run !Linux and select a kernel it just hangs.
A: !Linux v3.33 will not boot if there is no SIMM in the DRAM socket nearest the back of the machine, so if you only have one SIMM you may experience this problem - move your SIMM to fix it.
Q: The kernel hangs after giving it intialisation messages with either: 'Unable to mount root fs on 01:00' (if you started with 'DebianInst' - ie a ramdisc as root filing system) or just stops responding after the 'Freeing kernel memory: 16K' (if you started with 'DebianRun' - ie your hard drive as root filing system).
A: Having a 128Mb SIMM does not work properly for some reason. You need to tell Linux that you only have 64Mb RAM by adding mem=64M to the kernel options. This can be typed at the 'kernel arguments' prompt during booting to confirm the problem/solution, but for normal use you need to add it to DebianRun/DebianInst/!Linconfig (whichever you use to boot). eg DebianInst should be changed to look like this:
<Linux$Dir>.!Run -bootkernel <Debian$Dir>.zImage -initrd <Debian$Dir>.root/bin -args "root=/dev/ram mem=64M"
Q: After the kernel is supposed to have booted the screen is blank apart from a single vertical row of widely-spaced pixels. These move/change if you press enter or swap between virtual terminals (ALT-Fn).
A: You are in a screen mode of more than 256 colours. ARMLinux can only cope with up to 256 colours, and should change to a suitable mode on booting. If this mode change fails it will boot anyway and the described problem occurs (everything is working, but the display is corrupt). You can modify the !Linux.SetModeNew file to change to a suitable mode for your setup and then the problem should no longer arise. (It only occurs if your normal desktop mode is > 256 colours).
Q: The kernel boots but when it tries to access the Hard drive you get loads of scrolling errors, and the HD light stays off. I have a kinetic card.
A: The kernel doesn't yet know about kinetic cards and things sort of work until it tries to access the drive. Until this is fixed you need to use the Kinetic card in 'normal strongarm' mode. You do this by putting a link on the 3rd pair of pins in from the left of the card (looking from the front).
Q: On booting Linux I get 'Uncompressing kernel', lots of dots and '...done, booting the kernel', but then it locks up.
A: Several things seem to be able to cause this problem. The only confirmed one is having an I-cubed etherlan 500 ethernet card installed. There may be others - this is under investigation (2000.01.17). The problem appears to be specifc to the 2.2.16-rmk3 kernel supplied with the release. Try a different kernel if you can.
Q: Various packages fail to install, including 'exim' and 'at'. Also complaints about 'hostname' not being found and your logon prompt being (null) #
A: This is a known problem in the 20001207 release of Aleph ARMLinux. If you have no network card then the installer fails to set the hostname correctly - it sets it to '(null)' instead of what you entered. You can fix this by logging on as root and entering the following commands (using your preferred hostname instead of 'debian').
echo "debian" > /etc/hostname hostname debian
127.0.0.1 debian localhostThen run dselect again and the failed packages should install properly.
Q: I get stuck in dselect when selecting packages - it complains about libc6 versions.
A: This is a known problem in the 20001207 release of Aleph ARMLinux - the versions of libc6 and libc6-dev are slightly mismatched. This is not fatal. You just have to use 'shift-Q' to accept the selection 'as is'. It probably doesn't matter apart from this annoyance, but could potentially cause obscure compilation problems. Updated packages can be downloaded from ftp://armlinux.org/debian/
Q: After configuring the keyboard the installer asks to format my drive, saying that no partitions are detected.
A: Your partition table has not been recognised. This will happen if you have an IDEFS partition table on the drive but are using it on ADFS. There is a utility provided on the CD in Utils.APDL which can remove the old partition table and cure this problem. Trying to install to a drive that is not recognised by the installer (anything other than ADFS or IDEFS) will also cause this problem.
Q: I ran dselect and did 'Update' then 'Install', like the manual said, but nothing installed.
A: The first manual edition (published 2000.12.04) is misleading on this point. You do actually need to do 'Update' 'Select' 'Install' to get the set of standard packages installed. (Just hit enter in 'Select' to go with the defaults).
None yet Known
Q: One or more of my ARMLinux CDs doesn't seem to be reliably read in my CDROM drive, making installation difficult/impossible.
A: A couple of people have found that their CDROM drives cannot read the CDs reliably. We can supply CDs written at a slower speed which may solve the problem, but if you are experiencing this then your CDROM drive is probably due for replacement (they do wear out you know!)
Q: If I do 'apt-get install <packagename>' it gives a segmentation error and doesn't work.
A: This is a known problem due to a compiler bug. The workaround is to use dselect instead. You can also recompile it without optimisation or find an older version.
Last Updated: 2001.01.24
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