Forwards

Built a new null modem, found a thumb drive, and managed to get linux installed on the board, with the ssh daemon running at startup. The thumb drive was needed because the EFIKA firmware fails to talk to the disk properly, but it is now to the point where it will boot unattended. I will now work on compiling linux and AROS kernels and looking at what I need to do to get my graphics card initialised properly.

Doh!

Having ascertained that linux on ppc does not like my graphics card (hangs at 'returning from prom_init'), I plugged
in my null modem and got no output. This was curious - perhaps my null modem was broken. I opened it up and found that, in fact it was not a null modem at all, but something very strange I had built a few years ago which just happened to have 'null modem' written on it. Note to self: do not reuse components which have permanent marker labels on them....

inch by inch with the weary load

Well, getting Linux onto the EFIKA has been an adventure, and I'm not even there yet.
The EFIKA's firmware does not love certain USB keyboards. In particular, it has no love for mine. You can tell, because powering it up gives a bPlan logo, and nothing further. Resetting it gets you to the OF prompt, but pressing any of the modifier keys locks it up completely. This makes it impossible to type ':' ... I borrowed a different keyboard from work - and it worked just fine!

It is now happily loading the kernel using tftp, but I do not see console output. Null modem time, methinks...

Onwards!

L'EFIKA est arrive

The EFIKA board has arrived. It is absolutely tiny - and incredibly cool. Unfortunately, I do not have a spare ATX power supply here, so I can't start playing with it until this weekend. In the meantime, I have a linux-ppc installation running under QEMU on the laptop, and cross-compilation is getting incrementally closer.

Baby steps.

Thanks to the wonderful crosstools package, I now have a cross-compilation environment for the 603e processor. Building the loader from the aforementioned document produces a working binary which boots from the open firmware on my iBook G4. The road lies open :)

Purpose of the blog

Hello and welcome all to the beginning of my adventures with porting AROS to the EFIKA. I'll be posting up progress reports, misadventures, and useful links as I go along. Already, I've had some really helpful input from the aros-dev list: this article is just the ticket for getting started.