My favored platform for Astlinux is the small, cheap, compact, quiet and low power T5700 series of x86 based thin client boxes that can be had for <$100 on ebay.

I am having major problems, however in installing 0.6 on these machines.

As you may know, these things have a standard PC BIOS that can be set to boot off of the internal 44 pin IDE interface that is populated with a DOM flash device or external USB.

You can also connect any IDE device you wish to the internal 44 pin IDE interface with an appropriate cable. A PCI expansion housing is available to house a zaptel TDM card. I mod the device with a molex connector soldered to the main +12V PSU feed to power the TDM card.

The my test T5700 has 256MB of ram and the DOM is also 256MB. The USB ports are 1.1 (slow).

Astlinux 0.4.8 refuses to finish booting off the USB port on either a USB stick flashed with the .img version or an external CD-ROM and the .iso version.

Sooo to get the software installed I boot from a USB stick flashed with Damm Small Linux and dd the .img version to the internal DOM and off I go, no issues.

Which leads me to 0.6.....

Same drill for 0.6, but no joy on booting. The boot fails in LINUXRC with "AstLinux medium not found." just before it is to drop into the "Astlive" function and finish things up. The code is checking to see if the /cdrom directory is present and the "astflag" file is present in the /os directory therein.

RUNNIX successfully finds and checks the .run file and starts the new kernel, but the new file system never gets pivoted in by the new kernel, and we hang there. A manual check after the hang of the mounted file systems show that / dev/sda is not mounted and therefore /cdrom is not available.

I can at this point manually mount /dev/sda on /cdrom and all appears normal.

The strange part is this:

If I boot the T5700 using my DSL stick, flash the internal DOM with 0.6, then mount the internal DOM in DSL as /dev/hda1, then manually replace all of the files in the /os directory with exact copies, do a sync, pull the DSL USB stick and reboot, voila, Astlinux 0.6 boots normally off the internal DOM. Very strange. Somehow the T5700 BIOS does not like something in the build filesystem, but it perhaps will accept a filesystem that was produced or modified on its hardware.

This may be a timing issue on the mount process. Maybe if I add a sleep delay after the /sda mount this might work...?

As I said, Booting using an external USB CR-ROM and the 0.6 iso hangs at exactly the same place.

What exactly is the best way to edit the LINUXRC file to debug this? I am attaching the current file to this posting.

Attachment: LINUXRC
Description: Binary data





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