Hello from Gregg C Levine Something strange poked me, while I was reading the exchange concerning Steve's problems with his board, and the MAC address, and CMOS settings. I can't speak to that problem, nor advise a possible solution for it, but heres a general one. Can a list be drawn up of so called, "known good boards"? This reference list, to consist of chipsets, and board manufacturers, and a comment or two, from the person who created the port. That comment to mention if the board's IDE port worked, with the targeted disk drive. Also what else was needed to make the whole business work for him, with each board setup. Basically I want to prevent the problems that Steve is having with his onboard Ethernet controller. It would also make things easier for those of us who are considering getting to this idea, on a deeper business then just building the code on a specific platform that is not the target, as I've done, several times over. Everyone, if I am asking the impossible here, then I extend an apology, but I mean well. ------------------- Gregg C Levine hansolofalcon@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------------------------------------ "The Force will be with you...Always." Obi-Wan Kenobi "Use the Force, Luke." Obi-Wan Kenobi (This company dedicates this E-Mail to General Obi-Wan Kenobi ) (This company dedicates this E-Mail to Master Yoda )
On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Gregg C Levine wrote:
Can a list be drawn up of so called, "known good boards"?
It's on my "todo" for this week. Hope I get to it ...
ron
On Monday 23 September 2002 2:44 am, Gregg C Levine wrote:
Hello from Gregg C Levine
Can a list be drawn up of so called, "known good boards"? This reference list, to consist of chipsets, and board manufacturers, and a comment or two, from the person who created the port. That comment to mention if the board's IDE port worked, with the targeted disk drive. Also what else was needed to make the whole business work for him, with each board setup.
Sounds like an excellent idea. I recently went through the process of getting LinuxBios to work on what I thought was a pretty 'standard' board - a PC-Chips M810LR with SiS630 chipset, and there were two challenges in particular (the keyboard and the ethernet MII controller) which I would not have got working without key bits of help from Andrew Ip and Ron Minnich.
Having things like that summarised on a web page of all the boards people have tried LinuxBios on would be a good idea in my opinion.
Basically I want to prevent the problems that Steve is having with his onboard Ethernet controller. It would also make things easier for those of us who are considering getting to this idea, on a deeper business then just building the code on a specific platform that is not the target, as I've done, several times over. Everyone, if I am asking the impossible here, then I extend an apology, but I mean well.
I felt there were sufficient "non-obvious" bits about what I had to do to get my SiS630 board working that I wrote up a web page about it and sent it to Ron for the documentation section of the website.
I'd like to see this changed so that there are generic instructions which people should be able to follow for any supported board, accompanied by the little gotchas or quirks to look out for on particular boards / chipsets / peripherals.
Just my 2c
Antony.
I agree with the comments on the difficulty of getting this stuff up -- it's not for your average user.
Long term, the goal is that motherboard vendors just deliver boards with a working linuxbios. SiS pioneered this over a year ago. cwlinux.com does the same thing. Linux NetworX is delivering a ca. 1000-node cluster to LLNL, and LinuxLabs has been delivering linuxbios-based boxes for some time now.
We have two more vendors "in process" so hopefully some day linuxbios becomes a check box on an order from.
ron
On Monday 23 September 2002 4:20 am, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
I agree with the comments on the difficulty of getting this stuff up -- it's not for your average user.
Long term, the goal is that motherboard vendors just deliver boards with a working linuxbios. SiS pioneered this over a year ago. cwlinux.com does the same thing. Linux NetworX is delivering a ca. 1000-node cluster to LLNL, and LinuxLabs has been delivering linuxbios-based boxes for some time now.
We have two more vendors "in process" so hopefully some day linuxbios becomes a check box on an order from.
That's a great objective, but clearly it will take time to get there, and even when we've achieved it I think it remains in the spirit of an Open Source Software project to keep as good a set of instructions as we can on the website for people to be able to Do It Themselves, either because they want to, or because they want to try it on some new piece of hardware and need all the help they can get understanding how it's supposed to work on something functional before embarking on something which they expect to presentthem with challenges.
Antony.
* Antony Stone (Antony@Soft-Solutions.co.uk) [020923 00:55]:
On Monday 23 September 2002 4:20 am, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
That's a great objective, but clearly it will take time to get there, and even when we've achieved it I think it remains in the spirit of an Open Source Software project to keep as good a set of instructions as we can on the website for people to be able to Do It Themselves, either because they want to, or because they want to try it on some new piece of hardware and need all the help they can get understanding how it's supposed to work on something functional before embarking on something which they expect to presentthem with challenges.
It seems to me, one of the obstacles to documentation is finding someone with the time and authority to modify the webpages. How about running a wiki instead. I would recommend twiki or moin moin.
-- Randall
I agree with Randall. Once you get used to it, a wiki is an incredibly powerful tool.
I would recommend twiki over moinmoin, because it uses RCS to store the documentation in the backend, which allows you to see the complete editing history of a page.
Discover more at http://www.twiki.org/
Wout.
On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Randall Craig wrote:
- Antony Stone (Antony@Soft-Solutions.co.uk) [020923 00:55]:
On Monday 23 September 2002 4:20 am, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
That's a great objective, but clearly it will take time to get there, and even when we've achieved it I think it remains in the spirit of an Open Source Software project to keep as good a set of instructions as we can on the website for people to be able to Do It Themselves, either because they want to, or because they want to try it on some new piece of hardware and need all the help they can get understanding how it's supposed to work on something functional before embarking on something which they expect to presentthem with challenges.
It seems to me, one of the obstacles to documentation is finding someone with the time and authority to modify the webpages. How about running a wiki instead. I would recommend twiki or moin moin.
-- Randall _______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
OK, we'll talk about wiki here. I have to see if it is possible.
ron
Well, installing twiki isn't that hard, basically you untar a tarball, place some rules in the apache config, edit the twiki config file, and you're all set.
I recommend mod_perl on the apache server for speed, though.
It has plugins for on-line vector graphics editing, easy polls, etc. And you can really change the look and feel according to your liking. There are some pre-made skins which you can install.
Highly recommended.
Wout.
On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
OK, we'll talk about wiki here. I have to see if it is possible.
ron
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Antony Stone -
Gregg C Levine -
Randall Craig -
Ronald G Minnich -
Wout Mertens