my experience so far on a 3870 (success?)

Hi.... I'm rather new to Linux on the iPaq, been messing with it for a
month or so. Having recently bought a 2GB PCMCIA drive, I decided to take
the plunge yesterday, and try installing this.

This is a description of my trials and tribulations, mostly, in case
anyone else has banged their head against the same kinds of things.

At first, not knowing any better, I tried the 'old way' of installing, and
met with nothing but frustration. I think much of that has to do with it
being geared more for familliar 0.5x, where I was working with 0.61. (I
got the impression familliar 0.5x wouldn't support my 3870 as well). A few
tries just left me with something that didn't work.

Anyhow... I came across the 'new install', which uses the new VFAT support
in bootldr. I also like the fact that aside from the bootldr, it has no
dependancies on flash. (So i can have my Familiar and Intimate be
completely seperate). While it wasn't easy to get going, and still needs a
little cleanup, it is now looking MUCH better.

My first issue was that the supplied initrd's X fallback was hanging the
boot process. First order of business was commenting all that out if
linuxrc. (Using the instructions in Appendix A of the guide to modify the
initrd.)

Now it booted, all the way through. Configed USB networking, and tried to
install, but it wasn't seeing any of the PCMCIA cards. Looking through
dmesg, I found that it wasn't properly identfying my dual sleeve. So I
tried the single sleeve, and got the same.

To overcome this... all I did was boot into familiar, make note of what
modules it was loading, and in what order, and with this info, edited the
linuxrc on the initrd so that it would load the same modules, in the same
order.

A reboot later, it saw my sleeve properly, and identified the cards.

But I still couldn't install... and this was the easiest to 'fix'...
basically my MMC card was taking the expected /dev/discs/disc0 nodes, so I
just pulled it out for now. I imagine I could re-order the module loading
a little more to let the PCMCIA drive take precedence.

At this point, the installer worked just fine! After a reboot, it came up
fine, with the exception of X seemingly missing some of the runtime (xset,
xrdb, etc) so I just get the grey-hatched screen right now. I'm pretty
confident that this just a matter of installing some additional packages.

So there's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :)

If anyone want's a copy of the hacked up initrd, lemme know.

Joe
Received on Fri Feb 07 2003 - 05:52:59 EST