[Server-devel] Problems installing XS on new system for Uruguay

Thu Jun 5 13:39:51 EDT 2008

Tony,

trying to make the XS do raid (which it does (/did?) not support by default) I learned the following:

Linux softraid (aka dmraid) is 'better' / 'more stable' than mother board vendor's fakeraid, so disable raid in bios and let linux dmraid take care of it. I don't know enough about ahci to comment on that option.

Since you apparently want to install to a raid 1 you'll need to 'spin' your own personalized XS distribution.

my noob approach: set up a working fedora system (on other hardware than your target system - you may need to go back to this fedora system to make changes to your new setup).

Get the files necessary for making your own: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Building_Software distribution

A hands-on kickstart tutorial: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/08/19/kickstart.html - the "Creating the Kickstart Config File, ks.cfg" section gives you some food for thought. For the more grafically oriented looking at RedHat / Fedora's "Revisor" tool might be interesting (a quick intro can be found here: http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/70-Fedora-7-Custom-Spins-with-Revisor.html)

Good luck

Stefan

To: martin.langhoff at gmail.com
From: tpearson at us.ibm.com
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 09:31:32 -0700
CC: server-devel at lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Problems installing XS on new system for Uruguay

Martin,

I'll try the "lspci" commands
to see what it says.

What "dmesg" should I look
for?   -- when I do: dmesg | grep "sd"[ab]  I get that
it finds both /sda and /sdb individually, so not detecting the RAID mode.

The "autoinstall' fails either
because of the Radeon X1200 or the "clearpart" command on Line
23.  I've burned a copy of XS-160-noauto if you want me to try that.

I've been scanning the Fedora forums
for "dmraid" support, and it doesn't look like it has support
for this SB600 SATA RAID controller.

Uruguay = EduBlog/Ceibal/Greg Smith.
 I am building the server to Greg's request, so whatever he is now
calling this project that is what it is.

Thanks

Tony Pearson

Senior Storage Consultant, IBM System Storage™

Telephone: +1 520-799-4309 |  tie 321-4309 |  Cell: +1 520 990-8669

email: tpearson at us.ibm.com |  GSA: http://tucgsa.ibm.com/~tpearson

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/InsideSystemStorage

AKA: 990tony Paravane, eightbar specialist 

"Martin Langhoff"
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> 
06/05/2008 08:41 AM

To
Tony Pearson/Tucson/IBM at IBMUS

cc
server-devel at lists.laptop.org

Subject
Re: [Server-devel] Problems installing
XS on new system for Uruguay

2008/6/5 Tony Pearson <tpearson at us.ibm.com>:

> Hardware:

Nice hw! But the sata controler might not be supported. When you load

F8 64-bit or Ubuntu,

 - what does lspci say about the SATA controller?

 - what kernel module loads for it? (dmesg will name it)

> Problem 1:  I boot from XS-163.iso and select "Run from
Image" (the first

> choice) and it claims that "ATI Radeon 1200" is not supported,
and that it

It often complains about graphics cards. Nothing to worry about -

Compiz won't be enabled on the XS ;-)

> Problem 2: I log in as "root" and run the "./olpc-install"
and it fails on

> line 23 saying "Specified nonexistent disk sda in clearpart command"
with a

> big red button to "reboot". (see attached JPG file:  img_4751b.jpg
for

> screen shot)

Recent images are "auto install" so you don't need to run olpc-install

by hand...

>  Would that work?  If I do that, would I be better off doing
Fedora7-AMD64

> instead or stay with the 32-bit version?

Unfortunately, we have a few custom packages that are compiled 32-bit

only (nothing too bad, just a recompile away) - but I think your

problem is with missing drivers in F7. Can you try installing F7

32bits?

> Problem 3: the BIOS supports three settings:  IDE, RAID and AHCI.
 With

> RAID, I can hit Ctrl-F to get to the FastBuild utility, and put the
two

> drives into a single RAID-1 configuration, however, it does not seem
that

> Linux recognizes that.  With the two drives as one Logical RAID-1
drive, the

> Linux treats this as separate /dev/sda and /dev/sdb drives.

No idea bout AHCI or fakeraid - sorry

Now - one point I'd like to understand better - when you say "for

uruguay" you don't mean the Ceibal team, right? (From OLPC

perspective, if you talk about schoolservers in Uruguay, the Ceibal

team is what I think of...). You are doing this for the Edublog

Uruguay team... yes?

cheers,

m

-- 

 martin.langhoff at gmail.com

 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect

 - ask interesting questions

 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first

 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff

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