Weblog entry #147 for ajt
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Yesterday I set up a USB key with SYSLINUX and booted my dad's Viglen with it.
No dice - you need to put the USB key into the slower USB1.1 ports as the unit can't boot from the faster USB2.0 ports.
Tried again and a kernel panic, you need to turn of acpi before it will boot. Okay all running now and I followed the traditional Debian installer, all okay. Reboot and kernel panic - need to set acpi off in the GRUB menu and all is now fine.
Tonight I'll upgrade it to Lenny and add more than the basic install it currently has. From the command line it doesn't feel too slow, running x/xfce seemed very sluggish on ubuntu seemed very slow, which is hardly surprising as Viglen had turned on lots of services it didn't need.
It's not that it's a bad install or that Ubuntu is sluggish but a one-size-fits-all approach is sub-optimal if you know what you are doing.
Comments on this Entry
Thanks in advance....
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
- Only the slow USB ports at the rear can be used to boot the device.
- Install Linux onto a USB key using syslinux - it's in Debian.
- Boot the Viglen and make sure you have USB set in the boot sequence.
- When you get the boot menu press a key to stop the countdown
- Highlight the line you want and press "e" to edit the boot option, which takes you into the detail of that line.
- Highlight the kernel line and press "e" again to edit it. At the end of the kernel section add
pnpbios=off pci=noacpior something similar (I don't remember the exact incantation I required to get it to work). - Install as normal.
- Edit the new grub after install to make sure it has
pnpbios=offon the kernel line.
--
"I am not a PC - I am a free man!"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
From your guildlines above it seems as though your getting a grub menu (correct me if im wrong) where your pressing 'e' to add your extra boot commands...
When I have tried im using a standard flash drive with the boot.img.gz 'zcat'ed on and the Debian netinstall CD ISO (160meg). When booting this gives me the standard debian installer screen rather than a grub menu. From this screen I've typed 'install acpi=off' which will boot into the standard installer. This works up to the partitioner, this fails when writing the partitions to the disk (although the paritions seem to be created)... I've cheated my way passed this by using a second terminal to mount the ext3 partition to /target allowing the install to continue to the point of installing grub. When this tries to install grub it complains the partitioner hasn't completed and wont proceed...
Having said above I've not installed Debian from a USB stick before is a bit of a lie... I used the same stick to re-install another machine to test if the stick was faulty, this completed fine!
Can you expand on what you have on your USB stick (a fully bootable Debian install/grub/standard install image) and any other advice would be greatly appreciated?
Thanks again!
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Here is the exact GRUB lines from the running system:
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-486 root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-486 root=/dev/hda1 ro pci=noacpi vga=791 splash quiet initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-486
Better late than never...
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]