Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

starhawk · Posted: Tue 25 Jan 2011, 15:35 Post subject:

More to report. Dug out the above-mentioned graphics card and found it to be an ATi PCI-Mach32. Yeep. Better than ISA tho! and it WORKS! (Amazing what one can find in the bottom of a cardboard box of old computer cr*p...)

I can get VGA modes out of it, but nothing VESA. Maybe it's too old for that...? Unfortunately, the only other two graphics cards I have spare... well, one's AGP8x (not gonna happen) and the other is even older -- ISA.

I've got one other thing floating around in the back of my head. The AMD K6 CPUs do not natively run floating-point operations, nor do they actually speak Intel-i586. Instead they run an x86-emulator in microcode, to translate Intel instructions into AMD-K6-speak. This may be a kernel-level wall that I'm bashing my head against.

FWIW the copy of P412 Retro gets to either loading the Keyboard module (w/o Mach32 card) or starting to load modules (w/ Mach32 card) and hangs. I think that may be a lowmem issue, though.

Gawd I love old hardware Rolling Eyes

Beats pencil and paper, though, hands down.

EDIT: Thought of something a half-second after I hit "Submit"... what size is the Framebuffer in pUPnGO? I can set that in BIOS for the mainboard, and that may matter. Choices are 2MB, 4MB, and 8MB. No higher.

goingnuts · Joined: 07 Dec 2008 Posts: 626

Maybe a stupid question: pUPnGO is running 2.6.25.16 whereas the retro is running 2.6.21.7. Is retro for K6? And 2.6.25.16 wont run K6?

starhawk · Posted: Tue 25 Jan 2011, 16:59 Post subject:

According to this, the newer kernel should still work. I'm still thinking that it has to do with the framebuffer, but that could be a red herring.

James C · Joined: 26 Mar 2009 Posts: 4742 Location: Kentucky

I posted in the other thread about pupngo not booting on my old K6 box as well. Don't use it much,but I got it off the shelf for further testing.

As already noted, 041210 does not boot here either. But, Pupngo 200810 (same kernel I presume) boots and works fine on the old K6. Also booted regular Puppy 412....no problem.
My box has the K6-2 500MHz and 384 Mb of ram.

Also tried 041210 in my main Linux box with no problem so the download,disc and burn isn't part of the problem.

starhawk · Posted: Tue 25 Jan 2011, 17:32 Post subject:

I'm still fixating on the framebuffer issue Rolling Eyes

Keef · Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 428 Location: Staffordshire

You could try rebuilding the pupngo iso using the vmlinuz from the regular 412 and see how that goes.

starhawk · Posted: Tue 25 Jan 2011, 22:17 Post subject:

Called my source for really obscure computing info (my local computer shop*) and they sez that the kernel in pUPnGO should work.

So it's not that.

*If you're within an hour of Siler City, NC, it's worth the drive. Tritech is the name of the place. Just google "Tritech NC" and they'll come right up Wink

goingnuts · Joined: 07 Dec 2008 Posts: 626

James C, starhawk, Keef: thanks for info and hints. I will have to assemble a K6-box before trouble shooting can continue in this end. My best guess right now is that its BB in the latest version thats the problem. BB is one of the first call in init...It might be that this version is compiled for i686 - that explain no problem on a PII-box and problems on a K6-box.

Update: Changing BB solves the boot but other bins might also be compiled for i686 - so until a new build is made - for K6 use pupngo200810 and for newer hardware you should be able to use pUPnGO_V412_041210.
Sorry for this inconvenience!

starhawk · Posted: Wed 26 Jan 2011, 16:46 Post subject:

You don't have to mess with making everything work on the K6 just for me -- I just wanted to be able to boast about running something so awesome on really ancient hardware Laughing

no need to trouble yourself sick on my account.

James C · Joined: 26 Mar 2009 Posts: 4742 Location: Kentucky

Just because we had about 6 inches of snow last night and I decided to stay in today, I rebuilt the pupngo 041210 iso with the default 4.12 kernel.....same result. Smile

Booted the regular 041210 disc" puppy loglevel=7"...........stops booting at mouse detection......verified 3 times.

That old box pretty much just sits on a shelf unused, I only use it for occasional testing.

starhawk · Posted: Wed 26 Jan 2011, 16:59 Post subject:

James, if you look up two posts... it's the BusyBox GUI that's the problem. If I'm understanding goingnuts correctly, it has to have some stuff in the initrd.gz file pretty early in the boot process, and that particular version of BusyBox was compiled for PII and newer (i686 and up). All the other stuff probably is as well, so that K6-II box of yours probably can go back on the shelf for now.

goingnuts · Joined: 07 Dec 2008 Posts: 626

BB is compiled static using ulibc - i686 as default. And so are other of the static builds in 041210-version. Even though qemu is able to simulate different cpu´s (486, pentium, pentium2, pentium3) [using the -cpu switch] it does not catch the K6-problem. 041210 starts OK simulating i586. Guess its Intel-processor style and not AMD-style. It will take some time to rebuild everything - but might be fun - and maybe binaries is smaller compiling for i386....

Keef · Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 428 Location: Staffordshire

I've been trying the latest on my 'new' Armada M700 - 450mhz P3.
Unfortunately it hangs on shutdown when it gets to closing PCMCIA services. Tried it with a frugal install and from CD. However it does shutdown cleanly under qemu.
For reference I have tried an earlier version (23/05/10) and it does not have the same problem.

goingnuts · Joined: 07 Dec 2008 Posts: 626

Keef: Thanks for testing! I will look at that - probably missing pccardctl for eject to work...Attached a static build of it.
Update 30.01.11: Now I have had a chance to verify that shutdown works again with pccardctl installed (and do not if missing). So turned it into a "service pack" - nice word for bugfix...

sc0ttman · Joined: 16 Sep 2009 Posts: 2174 Location: UK

Sorry if this it totally irrelevant - I scanned the recent threads and think I saw something about AMD processor problems....

I got PupnGo to boot with no problems on my AMD sempron desktop PC.