Installation instruction issues

I'm referring to: http://familiar.handhelds.org/familiar/releases/v0.4/install/H3600/install.html here and am just poking at a few nits.

Loading the bootloader: Should the user be asked to check that the bootloader is protected and protect it if not?

It may not be worth mentioning, but if they have a relatively recent bootloader they can use the reset command rather than having to hit the reset button.

By default the kernel partition is 768KB in size, larger than what we currently need, and since I'm such a flash miser:

partition define kernel 0x80000 0x80000 0

For this reason, the current instructions also start the root partition 256KB into the kernel partition. The above command will actually fix that.

Since the flash size is slightly variable:

partition define root 0x100000 0x0 24

Will partition the rest of the flash from 0x100000 on as JFFS2. The length is ignored.

It seems we are back to the situation with the bootloader where downloads must be started very quickly. We should at least have some warning about this and possibly have them adjust xmodem_timeout (I think that's right) to some appropriate value (which I'm not certain of). I increased xmodem_timeout to 1000000, it seems better to me, although I haven't done extensive testing.

There are no instructions directing the user to configure /etc/resolv.conf.

We might want temporary directions instructing them to clear out /usr/lib/ipkg/pending after 'ipkg update', but then that is probably an easily fixed problem.

As far as configuring usbnet goes. There are some gray areas in the configuration: #1 Getting usbnet support on the host server and #2 There are at least 2 if not more ways of configuring masquerading support on the host side (ipchains and iptables). I would recommend linking to the wiki documentation ( http://handhelds.org/z/wiki/How%20do%20I%20setup%20USB%20networking ) for help with #1, at least for the immediate present. I think I can provide basic instructions for iptables from personal experience, I can steal Oleg's configuration of ipchains from the wiki document but I can't verify it or add to it. Oleg's documentation is pretty good, we might want something a little more streamlined.

After installing task-familiar-complete or any X related task, we probably need to have the user reboot.

Ken Causey (nikos)
Received on Mon May 14 2001 - 17:19:00 EDT