OK. Tested, actually just the swap file creation feature. There is another one: swap partition creation. I'm not really sure, that linuxrc can handle Amiga partition table, but first need to find a HDD without important data to test it.

For the rest, the latest factory has a number of problems:
- no graphical installation
- installing the bootmanager does not work, so one needs to use inst32 to boot into second stage and mkzimage to create a kernel
- KDE works, but GNOME has some missing packages (gdm, etc.)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Some updates: factory is still more broken than usually, but there is some progress:

- graphical installation works again
- source of bootmanager problem is identified
- KDE is now broken as well as Gnome, XFCE works fine :)

Linuxrc can't mess the partition table: it's not able to create partitions, just turn an existing partition into a swap partition. One just needs to make sure, that there is no important data on it.

Swap file creation on an existing partition also works, but takes a long time. But it still makes life a lot more easy.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Surely there is a way to create a file of a certain size rather than use dd or some other tool to create a large file?

In tests when we first discussed this, making a 300MB swap file took 8 minutes. I don't think 1024MB would be a pleasant experience.

For instance I can do this in Windows XP:
Under AmigaOS or MorphOS there are tools which simply use the system function dos.library/SetFileSize()

I'm guessing ftruncate or truncate would do the job here for Linux;
I just tested it and it works fine; I got a 1MB, 500MB and 1024MB file instantly.

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Matt Sealey

It does not work:
So we need to stick with good, old, slow, but at least working 'dd'...

To also say some good news: with todays 'factory' all of the dependency problems are gone! KDE & Gnome installs without any problem.

Bootmanager (yaboot) installation still does not work, but that's not a concern for EFIKA users, or any Pegasos users with older (<2004 Summer) firmwares anyway :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Well that sucks.
Our boot manager is mkvmlinuz or mkzimage.

I've never understood this obsession with yaboot. It's a hack designed to work around the closed nature of the Mac firmware which wouldn't read anything but Mac filesystems (and not even some of those).

Our firmware will boot a properly generated CHRP-compliant kernel, so what I don't understand is why you need a first level boot loader to string together a kernel and initrd and perform operations that the Linux kernel is able to do itself?

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Matt Sealey

Just want to note, that 'factory' seems to be heavily broken today :-( Linuxrc can't load the installation image (probably loop filesystem support was left out from the kernel)

Always look at the bright side of life (tm): at least I have some time left for my EFIKA project :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

probably because yaboot is some kind of standard now for PPC machines, as the macs are the most representated. I can see yaboot in all PPC linux distros, but pegasos/efika images missing most of the time. You're right to think that it's not the best option, but until you can convince most linux distributions mantainers and developper to make sure that the pegasos is supported with a CHRP kernel then support for yaboot in OF would be still useful.

Finally. After testing many heavily broken versions of 'factory', today a completely stable version arrived. Alpha5 is due to arrive this week, so hopefully that will be stable as well.

I installed KDE / GNOME / XFCE and there were no dependency problems, as even yesterday. There were some other positive changes: even if EFIKA install is not yet completely problem free its a lot more easy. HDD and Audio are still not detected (as was promised), but configuring networking does not need any more workarounds. If someone has an empty HDD, the installer still can start if an USB drive is connected, as linuxrc can now create a swap file on it.

And something for the Pegasos users: Xgl on PPC was silently fixed. It does not work on EFIKA ('dri' does not seem to work for some reason) and can't be enabled from the menu, but if 'gdm' is used as display manager, one can use the following command as root to enable it: 'gnome-xgl-switch --enable-xgl'. Of course it needs some hand editing of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and adding 'Load "dri"' to the appropriate section. I really hate any kind of eye candies, but was surprised to see, how well it works on Pegasos. Officially it's not supported on PPC and not supported on Radeon 9XXX or earlier, but in practice the code cleanup had some nice side effects :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

OK, I'll never ask for a 'factory' update during 'hacking week' :-) It's totally broken, can't be installed on any platform due to 'insmod' and 'gpg' problems...

BTW: Hacking week. It's a great Novell event, when all of their engineers can work on their favorite OSS pet projects without taking care of anything else (except for security updates). To read more about it, please visit: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/

My take: I guess, this is a kind of in office holiday for Novell engineers now that SLES 10 SP1 is released :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Novell is doing some good things. Novell just completed an upgrade to their partner systems including expanding options for updating product listings in the online product guide. Here is the Genesi listing:

http://www.novell.com/partnerguide/company/48832.html

We need to get an Open Client picture in there and have OpenSUSE and the whole "factory" process listed as a feature.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Factory is partially fixed now. Installation was fine on Pegasos, with one little catch: the installer can't handle ext2/ext3 filesystems at the moment. So I used good old reiserfs for installation. This means, that even those, who are lucky to have a recent firmware with yaboot support (2004+) need to create a boot kernel and put it somewhere, where the firmware can load it from. Fix for this problem is due this weekend.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

ext2 / ext3 support is back in yesterday's factory release. It installs nicely on Pegasos, but fails badly now on EFIKA. I ran into two major problems:
- installation crashes just before final hardware configuration
- Xorg does not work
A new version of factory is just being uploaded to mirrors, but no Xorg changes in ChangeLog...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/