On Sunday 09 December 2007 10:59:15 am Alexei Gerasimov wrote: > I happen to posses an old "Big Sur" machine manufactured by Intel, based > around two Itanium (Merced) CPU's and a 460GX chipset. The machine is > labeled as an "enginnering sample" (label: > http://ishells.net/spy/itanium/DSC00873.jpg), and looks identical to the > HP i2000 workstation (picture: http://ishells.net/spy/itanium/DSC00880.jpg). > > I have faced a problem of getting an operating system for it. Namely, > Linux. I have tried installing both Debian 3.0r6 Woody and Debian 4.0r1 > Etch, however, the CD kernel doesn't succeed to boot. Somewhere after > probing for USB and SCSI devices, the video signal is lost (monitor > switches into a stand-by mode), and nothing else happens. Since I'm > using some old Matrox graphics card, I thought it could be a problem > with framebuffer, but disabling the framebuffer didn't help. > > On the Debian website, it's stated that there could be problems due to > old BIOS/firmware versions. Here's what I've got: > > BIOS: W460GXBS2.86E.0117C.P09.200108091154 > SMBIOS: 2.3.1 > > PAL (A/B): 6623/6625 > SAL (A/B): 101/101 > Boot Block: 30 > > There are BIOS and firmware updates for i2000 available on the HP > website, but I'm not sure if they are compatible with my machine, and am > afraid of damaging either BIOS or firmware at updating attempt. > > Do you reckon it is safe to update? What else would you suggest me to do > about my machine to succeed with Linux installation? And is it possible > to run HP-UX 11i (probably v1.5/1.6/2.0) on it? I've only used the HP i2000 version, and even that's been a long time, but my guess is that the firmware upgrade would be safe, and that the appropriate HP-UX version would probably run on it. If you want to debug the Linux problem, you might try using a serial console (try something like "console=uart,io,0x3f8,9600n8" or "console=uart,io,0x2f8,9600n8"), adding some debug options ("debug initcall_debug") and booting to single-user mode ("single" or "init=/bin/bash"). Bjorn - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
![]() |