Just trying to set up my Efika with suse, however the rtc battery has gone.
Unfortunately, this provides complications for setting up suse (eg tar is complaining about timestamps, etc).

Is there a way to reset the clock from openfirmware, or from the suse rescue/installer CLI?

Any help appreciated.

[ Edited by boot_wb 02.06.2011 - 13:49 ]

as the efika and linux are concerned you'd certainly get the information by posting here : http://www.powerdeveloper.org/

You could boot the MorphOS install boot.img to set and save the clock.

Geit

Thanks Geit: quick & easy

@Soundsquare - thanks for the link, have come across various useful info on there, but have not yet got around to joining.

I've finally (after some effort) managed to get suse installed on my Efika... kind of.

Eventually it will be a headless Linux box for streaming music, with a Terratec Phas22 audio card installed.

Having followed the instructions*, ran the installer, and unpacked the image and kernel from Genesi.
All has gone well (despite complaints about timestamps).

*(Only difference being that I've installed to an external USB hard drive, as my Efika is currently without an ATA header.)

Now the reboot into Linux... except that the USB hard drive is no longer recognised once the kernel has loaded. (/dev/ lists no sda# or hda# drives)

Current openfirmware boot arguement (boot-file) is set to boot/efika root=/dev/sda1
(total command would be boot hd:0 boot/efika root=/dev/sda1)

I've tried adding "insmod usb-storage" , but to no avail.

Any ideas? Do I need to specify modules on the boot command?

I've been battling with the Efika for days now, just want to get the damn thing to boot.

@boot_wb,

Go on powerdeveloper home page. At the bottom of the page locate the 'platform support' section. In the right row 'pegasos ppc g3/g4' click on 'pegasos rtc fix' link. Read the instructions, download the file ftc.forth and copy it to the root of a partition, ffs or ext2/3, or copy it onto a usb stick. Then power up your efika, stop boot process, move to your usb stick or to the partition, ffs or ext2/3, then run the forth script by typing 'boot hd:X rtc.forth'. You will get some help about this little script, the same you can get by typing rtc.help. To get the current date and time type rtc.show. With rtc.reset date and time will set them to 1.jan.05 00:00:00 (on pegasos, maybe different initial date and time on efika). To set the date and time to the current one, '15:00:00 02.Jun.2011' for example, type '15 00 00 02 06 11 rtc.set'.

Good luck.

Brumiga

[ Edited by Brumiga 02.06.2011 - 15:14 ]

@Soundsquare - still waiting for my registration to be validated...

@Brumiga

Thanks, useful utility.

Still battling trying to get the thing to boot from USB hard drive though.

Basically, in the debug output I can see that it mounts the USB to ATA/ATAPI bridge, but there's no mention of the attached storage device.

Consequently, no filesystems are available from the console, no root partition is found, and startup exits with "no job control in this shell".

It seems that the mpc5200b usb support is included in the kernel after all. Could it be that the usb/ata bridge isn't fully supported at this stage of the boot process? Seems freaking weird if that's the case... I'd have thought lots of people would be using a similar setup (root fs on external drive attached via usb/ata bridge)

EDIT: just tried appending "rootdelay=10" in case the initialization of the usb subsystem required a waiting time... no effect, exactly the same. Bugger.

[ Edited by boot_wb 02.06.2011 - 18:28 ]

Really strange...

Booting from the rescue kernel, the usb disk is seen, filesystems present, everything in /dev/ as it should be.

Booting from the precompiled kernel (and image) from genesi, the disk is not seen and therefore filesystems not mounted. The only thing even vaguely resembling a device label in /dev/ is several "usbdev1.x_epxx" entries.

wtf?

[ Edited by boot_wb 02.06.2011 - 18:50 ]

Just done a complete re-installation.

During installation the target partition was on one hard drive (sda1).
A partition on second drive (sdb1) hosted the source (image, kernel, rescue kernel).

After installation, the second drive was removed - sda1 should remain sda1.

boot command used is:

boot hd:0 boot/efika root=/dev/sda1

Same thing happens - kernel loads so far, then gets to

Creating device nodes with udev
Waiting for device /dev/sda1 to appear: ...........Could not find /dev/sda1.
Want me to fall back to /dev/sda3?(Y/n)

Don't know why it wants to fall back to sda3 (sda3 was the swap in a previous installation attempt, but have re-partitioned the drive since then...).
sda2 was mounted as swap (not sda3). sda3 was partitioned, but not formatted, and certainly never mounted.

This is ridiculous - works perfectly during installation, fails every time when booting from the supplied kernel.

Still waiting for Powerdeveloper user login to be validated...

Any help welcome...

[ Edited by boot_wb 03.06.2011 - 13:11 ]