Slackware 12.2 runs...

[biff...@yahoo.co.uk]

You can run it too, if only you can decipher my notes:
http://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/Home/desktop-linux-distributions/slackware
(feel free to improve them...)

It's not so great as a file server - performance is about 2.5MB/s
using Samba (will almost certainly be faster using HTTP from my
experience).

Biff.

[RonRaleb]

I'll try it. My problem with Openwrt is that I wanted to get iptables
working (as I need it for my application) and it seems it might be a
pain to work with. That and a desktop distro is more flexible anyway.

[bifferos]

This is getting annoying. I can't find any references to how to set
the system clock from the fs superblock time (or the last mount
time). This would avoid the fsck-reboot-fsck-reboot type problem I've
seen when using Slackware. It usually sorts itself out after a few
reboots, but it's still really annoying.

I basically need to have some program which outputs the last mount
time of the rootfs (when it's been mounted read-only, in the early
stages of boot). Then I need to set the clock, and then run fsck.

This problem is mentioned here: http://www.slackware.org.uk/armedslack/armedslack-12.2/INSTALL_QEMU.TXT,
but it just suggests to disable fs checks, which is not really ideal.
I'd like to do the checks, but ignore inode times in the future (not
treat them as errors), or alternatively set the time so that they are
not in the future.

NetBSD does this automatically if you don't have an RTC, and I can't
believe I have to resort to writing C code to get this time (I presume
I could rip off fsck code because that must work it out).

Any help much appreciated.

regards,
Biff.

[Andrew Scheller]

> I basically need to have some program which outputs the last mount
> time of the rootfs (when it's been mounted read-only, in the early
> stages of boot).  Then I need to set the clock, and then run fsck.

What about this handy one-liner? :)
date -s "$(dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda2 | grep "Last mount time:" | awk -F"
" '{print $2}')"

I've only tested it on Ubuntu, but I guess it should work on Slackware too.

Lurch

[RonRaleb]

These guys doing Debian on the WRT54GL do the same thing (disable
fsck)

http://www.hwhack.com/network-devices/booting-debian-on-linksys-wrt54gl-a-complete-howto-t866.html

Ill google some more to see if someone solves this problem on any
other devices using some kind of logging/incremental counter method.

[RonRaleb]

Another problem is that whole business about:

udevd-event[1427]: mknod(/dev/vcsa, 020660, (7,128) failed: No space
left on dev
ice

Sometimes this freezes the boot, are you guys also having that
problem?

[RonRaleb]

Regarding the udev problem:

http://lists.o-hand.com/poky/0416.html

these guys were having the same thing happen to them on another
platform. Sorry to clog the board with so many posts, but I'm a linux
newb and all I can really do is help you guys search at least.

[bifferos]

I got that, but it never stopped the boot. I guess at the time udev
starts the file system is mounted read-only and I was thinking it just
comes up with the wrong error message. There were some references on
the net to this being caused by people running out of ramdisk space,
but here there's no ramdisk, so I'm baffled.

[Andrew Scheller]

The more help that bifferboard gets, the better IMHO :)
I'm afraid I haven't tried Slackware on my bifferboard (or even my
main PC!) yet, but following on from Ron's comments, I wonder if one
of these this might help?

http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=7521.0
http://forum.openvz.org/index.php?t=msg&goto=36041&

Lurch

2009/7/28 RonRaleb <tangra...@gmail.com>:

[bifferos]

Thanks for this! Updated the Slackware page although I don't
understand awk (and couldn't get it working) so used sed instead to
substitute out the 'Last mount time:' string.

[Andrew Scheller]

> although I don't understand awk

Neither do I ;)
I just did a quick google and adapted the example I found below to
split on a bunch of spaces instead of a hyphen
http://www.unixforum.co.uk/topic/22281-split-single-text-column-field-to-two-columns/

I've tweaked your sed version so that it strips out the leading spaces too.

Lurch

[RonRaleb]

So now that Slackware is at a point where it works semi comfortably,
my question is this. As I said, Im semi new to linux.

How do we get, for example, wireless (RT73 or RT2500) working? Do you
insert the modules provided in /lib/modules/2.6.27.7/kernel or do you
have to build the kernel like it says in the documentation?

And in terms of kernel building, I assume the process is this:

Download kernel sources
Install LZMA
Patch Kernel sources
Copy the .config into place
make menuconfig (to select kernel features)
make

If the kernel does need to be rebuilt, can you post your .config file
you ended up with Bifferos?

Thanks for all the help thus far guys, Im just semi new to this and
I'm sure other people getting into the Bifferboard platform will have
the same questions down the line.

[bifferos]

On Jul 29, 2:49 am, RonRaleb <tangramris...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So now that Slackware is at a point where it works semi comfortably,
> my question is this. As I said, Im semi new to linux.
>
> How do we get, for example, wireless (RT73 or RT2500) working? Do you
> insert the modules provided in /lib/modules/2.6.27.7/kernel or do you
> have to build the kernel like it says in the documentation?

From my HOWTO at http://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/Home/desktop-linux-distributions/slackware:

After compiling the kernel modules, it's necessary to copy them onto /
dev/sda2. This does the trick:
mkdir t
mount /dev/sda2 t
make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH=./t

Don't copy them manually, that's a mug's game. If you want to get a
USB wifi dongle working with Slackware you should be able to google
for that once you have something sufficiently close to slackware
running on bifferboard (that's the catch). You have all the userland,
but you need kernel + modules and the commands above should do that.
Delete any old modules that the slackware installer installed first -
they're no good.

> And in terms of kernel building, I assume the process is this:
>
> Download kernel sources
> Install LZMA
> Patch Kernel sources
> Copy the .config into place
> make menuconfig (to select kernel features)
> make
>
> If the kernel does need to be rebuilt, can you post your .config file
> you ended up with Bifferos?

Sorry I forgot to add my .config, will do so in due course, but I
removed all the modules, so you'll have to re-add the ones you need.
If you're a noob, you probably want to add all the drivers built as
modules which are mentioned in /proc/config.gz (on a desktop Slackware
system), just to be safe.

Biff.

[bifferos]

Just uploaded my config.

[bifferos]

I've attempted to compile the slackware kernel on the Bifferboard
system, so here is the result of 'time make bzImage':

<snip>
Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready (#1)

real 291m8.257s
user 196m14.101s
sys 27m48.087s

This was using a LaCie USB external 250GB drive with 128M swap
partition. Just about 4 hours all told. It was about what I
expected. I guess it would be significantly longer if I compiled the
modules.

Biff.

[RonRaleb]

A quick and probably a very simple problem in compiling the kernel.

I download the kernel (linux-2.6.27.7)
Apply the 3 patches attached in your slackware post
Copy your config as linux-2.6.27.7/.config
then make.

The problem comes when its all done (after about 5 minuntes). The
bzImage found in /arch/x86/boot is only 16kB. This also happens when I
just use the original slackware config. I must be doing something
glaringly wrong.

Thanks for all your help so far, sorry for asking so many questions

[Andrew Scheller]

Have you got the right version of lzma installed?
(I can't remember off-hand which is the 'right' version - I'll try to
find time to wiki about it)

Lurch

2009/7/30 RonRaleb <tangra...@gmail.com>:

[RonRaleb]

I was using Tukaani's version

wget http://tukaani.org/lzma/lzma-4.32.7.tar.gz

[bifferos]

You can try the 2.6.30.1 Tukaani patch from here:
http://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/Home/howto/faster-route-to-kernel--initrd

Or (better still) just look at the patch and make the change manually
(might be safer).

[RonRaleb]

Yea that might have been it, my bzImage is now 920k. If this isnt
quite it Ill let everyone know. Thanks again guys

For everyone out there:

That patch doesnt work, you need to manually apply it. To manually
apply it, the end of your linux-2.6.27.7/scripts/Makefile.lib should
look like:


# Lzma
#
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

quiet_cmd_lzma = LZMA $@
cmd_lzma = (lzma -9 -c $< && $(size_append) $<) >$@ || (rm -f $@ ;
false)

[RonRaleb]

By the way Biff, how did you modify your installation to allow make?

Ive been trying to make rt73 modules--http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/
~p_larbig/wlan/--

and I keep getting this:

make: *** /lib/modules/2.6.27.7-biff/build: No such file or
directory. Stop.

I tried linking it to a kernel-headers file but that didnt work.

[Andrew Scheller]

I've not tried compiling anything myself, but from a quick poke around
of the rt73-k2wrlz-3.0.3.tar.bz2 archive it looks like you need to set
the KERNEL_SOURCES and MODULE_ROOT variables in the Makefile.

Lurch

2009/7/31 RonRaleb <tangra...@gmail.com>:

[RonRaleb]

Ok everyone here's what I did. The accuracy and recommendability of my
suggestions are up for debate due to my newbishness. Take my
suggestions with a grain of salt:

Ok to build that module (rt73)

1. Grab the kernel sources (2.6.27.7) and extract them to /usr/src/
2. Copy the kernel .config of choice and copy it into the kernel
directory (Im not sure if this is needed because the next step
overwrites it I think anyway.)
3. make oldconfig && make prepare
4. make scripts
5. Went to the Makefile and changed..

KERNEL_SOURCES := /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build
to
KERNEL_SOURCES := /usr/src/linux-2.6.27.7/

6. make in your module's directory.
7. insmod rt73.ko

Of course I also built my kernel to include rt73 support (see the
thread wifi card installation for details)
Now my wifi works on the slackware installation. Thanks to Lurch and
Biff.