Vershun’s Brain Dump

The developers at Debian have made installing Etch on the IBM JS20 pretty easy for us. You no longer have to hack out a PReP boot using SuSE or any of those sorts of old hacks. There are, however, a couple of gotchas that still exist.

Here’s a simple guide to get Debian up on your IBM JS20 using CD as a medium:

Download the PowerPC architecture ISO from Debian’s site. I’d recommend getting the netinst just for getting the base system up.

Burn the CD and put it in the JS20’s media bay. Push the CD button on the blade you’re installing to (it should light up green).

Go into your management module and set the boot sequence of that blade to CD-ROM (under Blade Tasks -> Configuration).

Reboot the blade and start up a rconsole, you can do this by:

sudo rpower -n node reboot && sudo roconsole -n node -c -t &

When you get the boot: screen, use the 64-bit kernel by typing in “install64″ or “expert64″, depending on how much you’d like to customize the installation.

Go through the installation process as normal. Make SURE you do not change the /dev/hda1 partition. It should be about 8.2 megs and formatted as a PReP boot.

After your installation, the CD will pop out of the tray and will reboot. This isn’t good for us since we need the CD for the next step and so you’ll have to physically put it back it.

Boot off the CD once more, but load up the kernel “rescue64″. Go through the steps and spawn a shell on your root partition.

The reason why you’re using the rescue CD is because inittab will try to spawn getty on virtual terminals instead of SOL’s interface. Edit the /etc/inittab in your favorite editor and add the line:

hvc0:1235:respawn:/sbin/getty -L 9600 hvc0 vt100

Above the other getty commands (should start with 1, 2, .. 7).

Now go back into the management module, change the boot sequence to Hard Drive 0, and reboot your blade for a fresh install of Debian Etch!