Fueling my life!!!!

Yeeeessssss, This is my not new Fuel!!!!!

From a year ago there is not a lot of SGI machines in the second hand market and the price of this few machines was very high but this time, I bid on this Fuel and at the end I paid less that I paid for my Octane2. It has some scratches and repair will be hard but it works very nice.

This machine is a 600 MHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM. I think it's a medium range Fuel. Enough to watch the difference with my loved Blue One. Firefox and runs so smooth on this but... the same day the Fuel arrived I installed an extra GB of RAM in the Octane (2 GB total) I received some time ago from Ian Mapleson, and... WHAT A CHANGE!!! I can say that my old Octane2 has changed a lot and now is a lot faster. If one R12000 400MHz with 2GB is good enough, what can the Fuel do with the same amount of memory? Unfortunately I have to buy a complete set of dimm's because all the slots are populated and I can't afford this now.

Now I need sometime to check how many processes are running in both machines, maybe I don't need everything that is loaded in memory...

More comming soon...

Creating your own RaQ restore disc

This is one of the easy admin solutions working with Cobalt RaQ's. It's easy to create a new CD to reinstall the Cobalt OS (OSRCD) but modifying partitions sizes and including Updates and Packages.



At the Cobalt Faqs site you can find this fantastic HOWTO, and create your special disc. this is a fast job using any linux flavor. In my case I have Fedora 9 running in my laptop and I find something different: Fedora doesn't include mkisofs but include genisoimage tool -OK genisoimage is linked as mkisofs but the parameters are not the same-.



Assuming you have stored your new OSRCD in /home/osrcd, the working command must be:

# cd /home/osrcd

# genisoimage -P YourName -b boot/eltorito.img -c boot/boot.catalog -R -l -L -J -o /tmp/filename.iso /home/osrcd



Another important thing: After the installation of the OS in our loved RaQ or Qube the LCD shows the name and net address of the server (after seccond reboot) but it doesn't ask for intro the new address. After a few seconds you can see how the LCD displays the name of the first package to install. This is a little bit strange because after the reboot seems that everything is finished, DON'T TOUCH THE FRONT PANEL KEYS!!!

The LCD messages changues between the name of the package being installed and the ip address until the last package is in the hard disk, the the server shutdown itshelf asking to turn off power.

My new OSRCD has all the updates created by Sun in order a runs nice but before a created a OSRCD with all Zeffies updates and it hang with a fault of campatibility (or something similar).

Bye

Unix in a low cost laptop (part 4)

Yes... finally I have OpenSolaris 2008.05 working in my bad ACER 5633 laptop. Very tricky installation (I'm not an Unix especialist) but now I have a true Unix OS ready to work. As I said before it was a dificult installation and the next words are the steps I followed to bring OpenSolaris to work.

The first problem was boot the OpenSolaris Live CD. The firts atemps, at the time of the CD download was available, went wrong because of cardbuss warnings. After grub boot a have warning message: pciclass,0607000: Cardbus Present State 0x11111111. But this week I tried another time. Searching in Opensolaris laptop forums I found a topic where a guy said that he was able to install Solaris Community Edition in a laptop like mine adding ',acpi-user-options=0x8' to the boot manager of the CD (grub). This workaround doesn't work for me but I tried the with Opensolaris Live CD. After a lot of tries and more web search the correct option to add in the Grub boot config was '-B acpi-user-options=0x8'. This is my LiveCD grub config:



When the Desktop was shown I started the driver tool and saw that my Ethernet chip is not supported (Broadcom BCM4401-B01) but this is not relevant at this step. The ACPI system isn't supported (or no driver included) and this seems to be the reason why I need to deactivate ACPI at boot time.


Opensolaris is installed!!! Yes but it doesn't want to boot in first attempt. First edit the Grub parameters to disable ACPI and at the seccond reboot I have a warning saying SATA timeouts, something like this: Jul 30 21:24:55 xxxxx scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@12/ide@0 (ata0):Jul 30 21:24:55 xxxxx timeout: abort device, target=0 lun=0. You can see in this tread. The good workarround was disable the second CPU with de boot debbuger: edit the Grub parameters and add -kd to the second line (and the ACPI option also). When OpenSolaris boot stops in the debuger type usep_mp/W 0 :c, and then OpenSolaris started to load!

Now I had the User Login screen but ssssshhhh... I created an user account without password and I wasn't able to login!!!!! I don't now why but nobody can login as root..... Reinstall creating an account with password was the solution and... the OpenSolaris desktop appeared!!!


It's time to make the configuration parameters permanent. To edit the config Grub we have to change the file menu.lst, and this file is not in /boot like the linux systems. Using a ZFS pool the correct menu file is in /rpool/boot/grub. Because I can't login as root and I can't open File Browser with superuser rights, I opened a terminal window and used the su command to be root. This is my menu.lst file (I have all the disk for OpenSolaris):



Then I needed to disable SMP. Being superuser type gedit /etc/system and add at the end of the file set use_mp=0:

Now we can reboot an every thing is OKAY!!! Now its time to setup the network...