Last Update: 15 March 1999 Last Update: 15 March 1999
Known or Potential Problems
Please read the issues below to reduce your chance of running into problems that others have already seen and/or solved.
If you encounter 'problems' you will probably be asked to report the contents of one or more Linux Virtual Consoles (VCONs). Since Linux is a true multiuser/multitasking operating-system its possible to run several programs at the same time, each on a different Virtual Console, or screen. The RedHat Linux installer uses VCON3, VCON4, and VCON5 for debugging logs. If the installer halts due to a hardware or system configuration problem there is a good chance that VCON3 or VCON4 will contain a clue as to why the install failed.
You may switch to any of the VCONs with the key-combination of ALT-Fn (where ALT-F represents the ALTernate and FUNCtion keys pressed at the same time and 'n' is the VCON number). For example, VCON3 may be accessed by pressing ALT-F3 and VCON4 with ALT-F4. Return to the main install screen on VCON1 by pressing ALT-F1. These VCONs are also available under Linux once you've finished the installation. This means you can run several programs on several consoles at the same time. Its very convenient to be able to flip to a different console to check the state of the system or a particular program without disturbing your current application.
VCON usage during installation:
VCON1: Primary installation screen and user interaction.
VCON2: <advanced> user command shell after first-stage install.
VCON3: Installation progress and module load log.
VCON4: Log of device mounting and I/O.
VCON5: Logging output of accessory programs and disk formatters.
If the install process goes foul, you may be able to recover some information from the text runtime log in /tmp/syslog file.
Schatztruhe Linux disks may cause install problems.
The Schatztruhe RedHat m68k Linux CDROM appears to have problems with attributes on all of the installation files, particularly scripts. One solution is to copy the contents of the CDROM to your AmigaDos hard disk. You don't need any of the (huge) SRPMS files for the install. You may then perform a Linux install from the files on your local hard disk, using the supplemental floppy-disk (creating this floppy-disk is explained here).
HELP: is this still a problem with their current disks ??
RedHat 5.1 will not install directly from IDE CDROM on an A1200/A4000.
Due to a minor change between the RedHat 5.0 and 5.1 installer, some ATAPI cdroms may not be recognized. An updated version of the initrd.img file is available at sunsite.auc.dk or Italy. The use of this file instead of the initrd.img on the cdrom should fix the problem.
RedHat 5.1 may not install on A4000T.
There have been reports of problems installing RedHat Linux on A4000T machines. This is being worked-on, hopefully a solution is in the works.
Linux will not run if you do not have a math-coprocessor chip and a MMU.
At this time a math-coprocessor chip is required equipment for all versions of m68k Linux (not just RedHat). Also your CPU must have a functional MMU (Memory Management Unit, [address translator]), which means you need a 68020 or better. Emulation code is in the works, but this is a volunteer effort (which applies to Linux in general), so please be polite when inquiring about on-going progress.
DirCache partitions.
RedHat m68k Linux will not install correctly if any of your AFFS partitions have the DirCache option enabled. Linux may not be able to see or use any partition located on any drive also containing DirCache partitions. This affects system disk drivers as well as the afdisk program.
Problems recognizing peripherals after first install.
If you are having this kind of problem then you probably forgot to use the provided post-install/vmlinux-amiga file. Go back and read the Post-Install section- a little more carefully this time. The alternative is that you might have unsupported hardware in your system.
NFS/FTP installs fail or crash when gateway is specified during an install across the network.
So far the only solution I have found is to leave the gateway field blank during initial install, then specify the actual gateway machine when the installer lets you re-configure your network setups.
AmigaDos 3.x CDROM drivers do not correctly handle Rock-Ridge extensions.
One problem I noticed on the AmigaDos side is that the CDROM drivers that came with OS3.x cannot handle Rock-Ridge extensions correctly. You can avoid this issue by using more recent CDROM drivers (amicdfs240.lha from AmiNet seems to work a little better, but has other problems). AsimCDFS seems to work correctly on my A4000/040.
Hard disk partitions created on other platforms may prevent AmigaDos from booting.
This is not a Linux problem, but it is possible for the Amiga ROM boot process to lock-up if it sees partitions created by another operating system such as MsDos or intel Linux. The solution is to boot AmigaDos with a floppy and run HDToolBox on the new (alien) partition. Select the disk in question and enter the partition drive screen. After enabling the Advanced checkbox, Disable the Automount and Boot checkboxes, save the changes back to disk. AmigaDos should now boot correctly (assuming this was the cause of your problem). A worst-case alternative I've had to use several times is to use another Linux machine to zero-out the first hundred sectors or so. This can be done with the general command of ' cp /dev/zero /dev/sdX ' (be very, very careful here!).
A4000 IDE hard disk MaxTransfer problem under AmigaDos 3.0.
While partitioning the IDE hard disk on my A4000 having 3.0 ROMs, I found that I had to set the drive MaxTransfer field to a value of 0xfffe or the filesystem would become corrupt, and the system would eventually crash. This problem seems to have been fixed in the AmigaDos 3.1 ROMs.
Amiga video may loose sync during Linux startup.
After entering the amiboot command, the video from my (North American NTSC) Amiga(s) simply goes white or starts rolling and is unusable. The solution is to specify the video=ntsc option on the amiboot command-line, which forced the video to NTSC mode. If you have a VGA monitor connected to your A4000 you might use the video=vga option.
Netscape is not available for m68k Linux ????
This is not a real bug or Linux problem, but this is probably the most common question heard on the newsgroups. At this time Netscape has not released a version of their browser for m68k or Alpha Linux (yes, I also run Alpha Linux). Although there are rumors of an (unsupported) developer version of Mozilla that runs on m68k, installation and compilation of such a large package is not recommended for beginners. An alternative might be KDE, but thats a whole environment of its own….