Debian Ports Installation

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Installation of PA-RISC Linux

HPPA became an officially supported Debian architecture in release 3.0 (woody) and was dropped as of stable release 6.0 (squeeze). That's the reason that the latest available official installation CDs are available for Debian 5.0 (lenny) only.

The Debian ports project hosts a parisc version of debian unstable. Today the recommended installation of a new parisc machine is via the debian-ports unstable respository at http://debian-ports.org as described in the following section.

If you want to install debian the hard way with many manual steps, you can read the instructions at Debian_Ports_Installation_Manual.

Installation of Debian unstable via debian-ports repository

The latest installation medias for Debian unstable is available at either one of the following locations:

  1. http://parisc.osuosl.org/debian-cd/
  2. http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/
  3. http://landcomp.net:884/debian/debian-cd/

In those directories you find (you need to download only one of those):

  • lifimage file, used for tftp/netbooting the installation
  • debian-7.0-hppa-NETINST-1.iso, ISO image to burn to a CD/DVD for booting
  • debian-7.0-hppa-CD-1.iso, full ISO image with all packages for booting via CD/DVD


Installation instructions

  • If your machine is behind a firewall, enter the proxy at the IPL command line the Linux kernel command line (change parameter 7):
  mirror/http/proxy=http://proxy:8080   (adjust the proxy settings to your need and drop the underscores)
  • At the "Software selection" screen, do not enable other software than "SSH server" yet. You can install additional software later!
  • When the installation finished, do not press "Continue" to reboot the machine, but instead choose "Go Back" and then in the main menu choose to execute a shell. In the shell type the following command to enable serial console (needed e.g. for boot console on GSP):
 echo "T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100" >> /target/etc/inittab
  • Type "exit" to quit the shell and return to the main menu.
  • In the main menu choose to "Finish the installation" and let it reboot the machine.

Notes:

  • After reboot the sshd daemon will not accept password-logins for root. You may need to log in as user and then become root via "su -". To change the sshd behaviour, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and change the value of PermitRootLogin to yes.


Technical background

The installer images mentioned above pull the debian packages from the repository at http://parisc.osuosl.org/debian/ which contains only the minimal set of necessary files for installation.
This is realized by the preseed/url=http://parisc.osuosl.org/debian/preseed.cfg Linux kernel parameter which is hardcoded in the palo bootloader code in those images.
We would have liked to directly install from the official debian unstable repository at http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/ but this is not possible, because:
  1. The debian ports repository is a moving target, which means that the Linux kernel udeb packages which are needed by the kernel on the ISO/liffile may not be available any longer at a later date, and
  2. The debian ports repository is missing the http://parisc.osuosl.org/debian/palo-installer_0.0.15_hppa.udeb and http://parisc.osuosl.org/debian/partman-palo_20_hppa.udeb packages which are needed to install the palo bootloader during installation.
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