********************************************************************** * * * Installation instructions for Slackware on the SGI 320 and 540 * * (and any other SGI Visual Workstations that boot with ARC). * * * * Prepared by Patrick J. Volkerding * * * * SGI and Visual Workstations are trademarks of SGI, Inc. This * * is an unofficial Slackware installation document prepared by * * Slackware, Inc., and is not an SGI product nor is it supported * * by SGI, Inc. * * * ********************************************************************** WHAT YOU WILL NEED ------------------ To start the installation process, you'll need a copy of Slackware on CD-ROM with the /sgiboot/ directory on it (or at least the arclx.exe and vmlinux files on a CD), and a copy of the color.gz rootdisk on floppy disk. To make the color.gz rootdisk, see the instructions in the /rootdsks/ directory. BOOTING THE INSTALLATION DISK ----------------------------- The SGI Visual Workstation cannot "boot" a CD or floppy in the same way as a standard PC, and LILO will not work. Fortunately, SGI has helped out with a small boot loader program "arclx.exe" which works from within the SGI boot menu built into the system's firmware to allow you to boot a Linux kernel. Here's how to use it to boot the installation disk: - Put the Slackware CD into the CD-ROM drive, and the color.gz floppy into the floppy drive, and start the system. - Get into the machine's "welcome" screen. If the machine has no OS you might end up at this automatically, otherwise watch for a dialog box that says "Press ESC to stop system boot." and press escape when you see it. - Go into the "Startup Settings" menu, and set up an entry for "Linux install". To do this, hit the "New" button, and fill in thesei values: Load Identifier = Linux Install OSLoader = \sgiboot\arclx.exe OSLoad Filename = /sgiboot\vmlinux OSLoad Partition = CDROM System Partition = CDROM OSLoad Options = load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=6000 root=/dev/fd0 rw Note the strange use of '/' and '\' -- you have to get those right or it won't work. Took me about forever to figure that one out. :) Now hit the "Default" button, then "Save & Exit". - Now you can start the installer with the "Start System" button. Hit enter to load the installation floppy when prompted, and then log into the installation disk as "root". PARTITIONING THE HARD DRIVE --------------------------- Now you'll need to partition the hard drive to accept Linux. First, use fdisk or cfdisk to remove any existing partitions. (NOTE: I've never had NT around for testing, so if you're trying to make Slackware coexist with NT, you're somewhat on your own... I'd imagine you'd be fine setting up Linux in existing freespace, though. Linux shouldn't mess with NT in any way on the SGI since the usual blunder of installing LILO wrong shouldn't apply :) If your hard drive is IDE, partition /dev/hda. For SCSI, use /dev/sda. You'll probably want at least these three partitions (this is what I'd recommend anyway): 1. FAT partition, 32MB. This will be to store a copy of the boot loader (arclx.exe) and the kernel (vmlinux), so that eventually you'll be able to set up the machine to boot directly from the hard drive without a CD. Make the partition at the beginning of free space, and tag it type 06. 2. Linux swap partition, 256MB. This should probably at least match the size of the RAM in the machine, and maybe more if you'll be doing memory-intensive tasks such as rendering. Make this the second primary partition, and tag it type 82. 3. The root Linux partition. Make this partition number three, as large as the drive has room for. It should be type 83 by default. Save your changes using "w" (in fdisk) or "Write" (in cfdisk), and quit the cfdisk program if neccessary. RUNNING THE INSTALLATION PROGRAM -------------------------------- To start the installation program, type "setup". Many of you have done this part a million times already, but I'll go through the basic procedure here for a full installation. Start off with the "ADDSWAP" menu choice. Your swap partition should be detected -- follow the defaults to format and activate the swap space. Then you'll move on to the TARGET section. Again, follow the defaults to format and mount the root partition (quick format, 4096 bytes per inode), and then continue with setup. Select "NO" to setting up the FAT/HPFS partition(s). Since the small FAT boot partition is not yet formatted, you don't want to have Linux trying to mount it. We'll get to that later. Moving on to the SOURCE section... autoscan for the Slackware CD-ROM. (Experts may venture off the marked trail here if they so desire) Use the "slakware" (normal) installation type. Next is the SELECT section. The default choices here should be just fine -- since only the framebuffer X server works on the SGI 320 and 540 you won't need the XD series. So, hit enter taking the defaults. The next part is INSTALL, where the packages are installed. Go with the "full" installation mode here. You'll see various description pages fly by as all the packages are installed in a few minutes, and then you'll go on to the CONFIGURE section. Here's what you'll need to do at each of the post-install menus: menu title do this ---------- ------- INSTALL LINUX KERNEL skip MAKE BOOTDISK continue MODEM CONFIGURATION if you have a modem, set it up CDROM DEVICE DETECTED NO (up to you, though) SCREEN FONT CONFIGURATION NO (it's probably best to wait until later) INSTALL LILO skip CONFIGURE NETWORK YES (and then set up your network) MOUSE CONFIGURATION ps2 (we'll rig this to work later) GPM CONFIGURATION NO SENDMAIL CONFIGURATION I like "MAPSRBL+", but that's up to you. HARDWARE CLOCK NO (this won't matter anyway, since clock configuration is skipped on the SGI, as hwclock seems to be too PC specific) TIMEZONE CONFIGURATION Select your timezone. SELECT WINDOW MANAGER FOR X Hit ENTER to accept KDE (the default), or pick something else if you like it better. WARNING: NO ROOT PASSWORD YES (and set a root password) SETUP COMPLETE OK Slackware Linux Setup EXIT This will put you back at the # prompt. Next, unmount the partition you've just installed to: umount -a Expect a couple harmless errors from that one. :) Then reboot the machine using the reset button. REBOOTING THE SYSTEM -------------------- After rebooting the system, you'll want to change a few things in the "Startup Settings" menu, so watch for the "Press ESC to stop system boot." and press escape when you see it, and then enter the "Startup Settings". Now you'll want to set up an entry to boot the newly installed system with the kernel and loader on the CDROM. To do this, hit the "New" button, and fill in these values: Load Identifier = Slackware OSLoader = \sgiboot\arclx.exe OSLoad Filename = /sgiboot\vmlinux OSLoad Partition = CDROM System Partition = CDROM OSLoad Options = ro root=/dev/hda3 mem=256m gfxmem=8m (this example is for a machine with 256MB of RAM... if you don't have 256MB, then use the correct amount instead. if you don't use a mem= at all, the kernel will default to 128MB. The gfxmem=8m is the amount of RAM to use for the graphic framebuffer device. Setting it to 8MB allowed the use of higher color depths, but how to get better than 800x600 resolution out of it is still a mystery to me) Now hit the "Default" button, then "Save & Exit". Hit the "Start System" button to boot the installed system, and log in as root. We still have a few more things to clean up before we're done. BOOT CONFIGURATION ------------------ Since you're not going to want to keep that CD in the CDROM drive forever, here's how to move the kernel onto the hard drive. First, mount the CD: mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom Then, you'll need to format the FAT partition. You can use "fdisk -l" to take another look at the partition list before you do this. In the partitioning example above, the FAT partition was to be the first partition on an IDE hard drive, which would be /dev/hda1. (If you use SCSI, the partition is /dev/sda1) To format this partition with the FAT filesystem, use this command: mkdosfs /dev/hda1 mount the new partition: mount /dev/hda1 /mnt and, copy the loader and kernel to it: cd /cdrom/sgiboot cp -a arclx.exe vmlinux /mnt Reboot the machine with this command: reboot After rebooting the system, you'll want to change a few things in the "Startup Settings" menu, so watch for the "Press ESC to stop system boot." and press escape when you see it, and then enter the "Startup Settings". Next, we have to adjust the "Slackware" boot menu entry to boot from the hard drive, instead of the CDROM. To do this, you'll need to use these entries: Load Identifier = Slackware OSLoader = \arclx.exe OSLoad Filename = /vmlinux OSLoad Partition = IDE 0 Disk 0 Partition 1 System Partition = IDE 0 Disk 0 Partition 1 OSLoad Options = ro root=/dev/hda3 mem=256m gfxmem=8m Now hit the "Default" button, then "Save & Exit". Remove the CDROM and floppy from the machine, hit the "Start System" button to boot from the hard drive, and log in as root. MOUSE CONFIGURATION ------------------- The SGI-enabled Linux 2.2.10 kernel provides a USB mouse driver that emulates the PS/2 mouse. The simplest way to get applications to use this is to make a symlink to the usual location for the PS/2 mouse driver, like this: cd /dev rm psaux ln -sf oldusbmouse psaux That should be enough to get X going with "startx". THINGS I WISH ------------- That there was a way to increase the resolution of the framebuffer, or (even more ideally) that there was native XFree86 support. That I could get a newer kernel than 2.2.10 to work... this was the last kernel for which SGI provided a patch. I've ported the patch to 2.2.17 and gotten it to compile, but the kernel won't boot. All the required drivers come with 2.2.18, but again, the kernel compiles but won't boot. 2.4.0 also claims to support the SGI Visual Workstation, but those parts of the kernel don't compile. I'd sure like to hear from anyone with source for a newer kernel that works. THANKS ------ ...to Digital Domain (www.digitaldomain.com) for loaning me an SGI Visual Workstation so I could enjoy all of its quirks. :) Have fun! -- Patrick J. Volkerding 08-Jan-2001