Trying to get an OS onto a Yeeloong 2F

[David Crawford]

Hi all,

I've dug my Yeeloong 2F out of storage and have been trying to get an OS onto it. I've tried Debian, but it fails to install GRUB  - then cannot find boot.cfg when it tries to boot. I wasn't able to manually boot it with karg.

The only OS's I've managed to get onto it successfully are the Lemote Debian restore and Free BSD. The former is in Chinese and the latter doesn't have functioning wireless. :(

I've had Debian working fine on it in the past - I'm not sure what to do. I'll settle for any OS, command line or GUI as long as it's in English and the Wifi works. Would appreciate some advice as to what's currently the best OS to put on this system. The Lemote Debian would be fine if I could get it into English.

David

[Jactry Zeng]

Hi David,

2014-08-02 19:13 GMT+08:00 David Crawford <dtgcr...@gmail.com>:
>
> I've dug my Yeeloong 2F out of storage and have been trying to get an OS onto it. I've tried Debian, but it fails to install GRUB  - then cannot find boot.cfg when it tries to boot. I wasn't able to manually boot it with karg.

Is there an error about "fail to install dummy"?

Here is a tip to deal with it:

0. After the error, don't exit the installer. Enter to "shell mode"
1. Edit /target/boot/boot.cfg and append these lines:

```

default 0

timeout 0

showmenu 0

title Debian 8

kernel (wd0,0)/vmlinux-3.2.0-4-loongson-2f 

args root=/dev/sda5 rw quiet

```

note: 

kernel (wd0,0)/vmlinux-3.2.0-4-loongson-2f 

args root=/dev/sda5 rw quiet

These two lines relate to what version of kernel you have installed and where you installed it.

Hope this helps!

--

Regards,

Jactry Zeng

[Mark Johnson]

David, I'm only a user (not a developer) of a Lemote Yeeloong 2F, but
I've owned this since 2011, and I've used gnewsense the whole time
without a problem.

I recently installed the latest gnewsense after running
gnewsense "metad" for for a few years. I found the installation
process via USB to be very smooth and easy. The wi-fi works fine. The
latest version has gnome desktop, which is more complete than what I
experienced with "metad". The only problem seems to be that the
gnewsense website is unavailable at times, but you can just get the
cached page from google. I think it'll be worth your time to try gnewsense.

The instructions for gnewsense are here:
www.gnewsense.org/Projects/GNewSenseToMIPS

Good luck,
Mark

On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 04:13:32AM -0700, David Crawford wrote:
> Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 04:13:32 -0700 (PDT)
> From: David Crawford <dtgcr...@gmail.com>
> To: loongs...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: [loongson-dev] Trying to get an OS onto a Yeeloong 2F

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Mark J.
FSF Member number #11706
free software is cool

[Michael Dorrington]

On 02/08/14 12:13, David Crawford wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've dug my Yeeloong 2F out of storage and have been trying to get an OS
> onto it. I've tried Debian, but it fails to install GRUB - then cannot
> find boot.cfg when it tries to boot. I wasn't able to manually boot it with
> karg.

Were you trying stable or testing?

Did you try the instructions at:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianYeeloong/HowTo/Install

Regards,
Mike.

--
FSF member #9429
http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=9429
http://www.fsf.org/about
"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide
mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all
free software users."

[Justin Cormack]

Gentoo worked well for me. But installing it was a pain from memory, I
seem to remember just untarring it into a spare partition in the
existing system and then setting the bootloader to boot into it.

Justin

[Dennis Lan (dlan)]

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https://blogs.gentoo.org/blueness/2014/07/02/continued-support-for-the-lemote-yeeloong-gentoo-mips-is-alive-and-well/

http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f/
check the README file, all should good to go.

[Anthony G. Basile]

Also read https://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/mips/yeeloong.xml It
should not be too hard to install. I did my best to make it as painless
as possible.

[David Crawford]

Hi all, thanks for the suggestions. I've tried gnewsense recently and had the same problem as Debian. For Debian I used the page linked above.

I'm trying to install Gentoo now, but I don't understand how to use fdisk to create the partitions. I haven't created disk partitions with commands since Windows 95. :D

[David Crawford]

I've tried to install gnewsense tonight. The install went fine, however I get this when booting into the OS:

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount fs on unknown-block(8,6)

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Wed, 6 Aug 2014 06:16:37 -0700 (PDT)
schreef David Crawford <dtgcr...@gmail.com>:

> I've tried to install gnewsense tonight. The install went fine,
> however I get this when booting into the OS:
>
> Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount fs on
> unknown-block(8,6)

Do you have the right root partition set in boot.cfg, e.g.

args console=tty no_auto_cmd root=/dev/sda1

[David Crawford]

Hi Sam,

For some reason the machine is missing boot.cfg again, it cannot be found at boot. I don't understand how this happened to Debian and gnewsense, they both used to work fine.

The full error when I boot via karg is

VFS cannot open root device sda6 or unknown block8,6) error -6
Please append a correct "root=" boot option, here are the partitions
Sda1, sda2, sda5

Then the kernel panic error. I auto partitioned when loading gnewsense.

Thanks agains,

David

[David Crawford]

ah got it! I didn't realise I had to at al and karg :D

On Saturday, August 2, 2014 9:13:32 PM UTC+10, David Crawford wrote:

[Michael Dorrington]

The 'console=tty no_auto_cmd' bit is not required, and in the case of
'no_auto_cmd' is not used. I removed this from the Debian wiki install
instructions in 2013-03-06.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianYeeloong/HowTo/Install?action=diff&rev2=53&rev1=52