This is the very first installation report for Debian on S/390. Since I am currently the only one, who is not on vacation and I don't know exactly how to package the installation utilities, the installation is based on the files sid.initrd (ramdisk image) sid.image-2.4.5 (kernel image) sid.parmfile (parameters passed to the kernel) found at http://source.rfc822.org. As soon as we will have uploaded the utilities, we will write the next report. All manual steps will be covered by a script in the next version of the installation utilities. The installation has been run in a virtual machine from a virtual (card) reader.
First of all I downloaded the 3 files and added non-free network modules from http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/linux390/download_obj.html to the ramdisk. Then I adapted the parmfile by adding the address of the disk Debian was to be installed on. After the files had been put into the virtual reader, the boot process was started by ipl 00c clear .. After the successful boot, the network modules were loaded by insmod. The network setup was done by ifconfig and route. These steps were executed on the console. insmod qdio insmod qeth qeth0,0xPPPP,0xPPPP,0xPPPP ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx route add default gw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx After the successful network setup, the change of the root password and the creation of a non-root user, a telnet session with a non-root user was started. By switching to root the installation process was continued. I added then the search domain and nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf. The next commands are: dasdfmt -b 4096 -f /dev/dasd/yyyy/device to format the disk. fdasd /dev/dasd/yyyy/device to create a partition. mke2fs /dev/dasd/yyyy/part1 to make a filesystem. Then I mounted it by mount /dev/dasd/yyyy/part1 /mnt In order to enable proxy settings I edited /etc/wgetrc. and then issued debootstrap sid /mnt http://source.rfc822.org/debian which ended successfully. The next steps were: copy /etc/inittab to /mnt/etc/inittab chroot /mnt change root password add a non-root user edit /etc/network/interfaces edit /etc/hostname add search domain and nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf edit fstab adjust /etc/apt/sources.list install kernel-image install ssh edit /boot/parmfile zipl -t /boot -i /boot/image-2.4.5 -p /boot/parmfile which is the bootloader on S/390. Finally I issued halt ipl xxx clear using the disk address as xxx. After the successful boot, I could login with ssh and install additional packages. Regards, Gerhard
