installation experience

I am making slow progress with my intimate installation.
Right now I am juggling around three different ipaqs (36xx,38xx,55xx)
with different results.

Originally, I planned to exactly copy the ipaq cluster configuration at handhelds.org/crl.
Pretty soon I decided to abandon the addonics hd drive and instead boot and
install intimate from a 512MB SanDisk flash.
Apparently, there are stiill issues with the hd drive and xscale based ipaqs under linux.
(Sidenote: wince on the 55xx DOES detects the hd drive so this seems to be more of a software
than a hardware issue.)

I also learnt the hard way not to use bootldr 2.20.4.
On my 38xx 2.20.4 had trouble accessing the cf. It even affected wince
(my ipaqs are dual boot) which would not detect the cf either.
With 2.18.54 CF detection/booting is more reliable but occasionaly the bootldr
can not find the the CF, in those cases it helps booting into wince temporarily.

The intimate bootstrap did not detect my ethernet card correctly (netgear fa411),
because of a lacking entry in /etc/pcmcia/config.
I created a new initrd image and that seems to work now.
Sidenote: the original initrd image contains directory hardlinks which I could not
replicated under linux:

cp: will not create hard link `/tmp/initrd/intimate' to directory `/tmp/initrd/dev'
cp: will not create hard link `/tmp/initrd/mnt/intimate' to directory `/tmp/initrd/mnt/familiar'
cp: will not create hard link `/tmp/initrd/mnt/ramfs/var' to directory `/tmp/initrd/mnt/ramfs/tmp'
cp: will not create hard link `/tmp/initrd/proc' to directory `/tmp/initrd/mnt/vfat'

I replaced them with symlinks which seems to work.

Finally I got to the point where I could run

intimate-install

Unfortunately, the script returned right away without doing much.

I then started to execute parts of said script manually:

export PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin/
INTIMATE="/mnt/intimate"
echo "Downloading base packages"
debootstrap --arch arm --exclude=ipchains,sysklogd,telnet,klogd,exim --include=ssmtp woody ${INTIMATE}

This actually started installing intimate for me but eventually I ran into hardware problems again.
The kernel emits a lot of the following messages

hda: lost interrupt

and no progress appears to be made.
I also got lost interrupts for my ethernet cards but the system seems to recover from those.

Is there any way to work around the lost interrupt problem?

Robert
Received on Thu Sep 18 15:19:35 2003