INSTALLING PA-RISC Linux

These days PA-RISC Linux is installed using a fairly standard Debian Linux installer, usually from a CD. If you can’t use the standard CD-ROM install, there are several other methods (network, tape, etc…). This PA-RISC/linux-boot HOWTO by the ESIEE team in France may be helpful. And if you get stuck please ask the parisc-linux mailing list. You might want to join it too.

The old completely unautomated method is described below for people with special situations where no Debian install works.

This document explains some of the ways that PA-RISC Linux is different from other Debian Linuces so you can be better prepared during the installation process – this is not an installation manual. Since most things are common between PA-RISC and other flavors of Debian Linux, you can use the fine documentation at www.debian.org.

HP-UX and Linux on a Single PA-RISC Box

You’ll need a separate disk drive for Linux from HP-UX. Sorry for that limitation but it’s the way things are.

During the installation process, you will need to partition a disk and you need to choose the right one! Start by interrupting the boot process following the instructions, either pressing ESCAPE or “any key” within a certain time limit.

Once you’re talking to the boot firmware, type “path”. This will give you a message like:

Primary:    FWSCSI.6.0

That tells you your current boot path is the disk at SCSI address 6 (it’s almost always 6). To see what disks are present, ask the firmware to “search”. After a while it will give a list of bootable devices it found which may include disks, tape, cd-rom(IDE), and network(LAN), including the disk mentioned by the “path” command above.

Linux names SCSI disks /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc… starting with the LOWEST SCSI ID, so from the list above you can figure out what names Linux will assign and be sure to avoid the ones imporant to HP-UX.

Our Boot Loader isn’t Lilo

Our boot loader is palo, not lilo. The palo README is a bit out of date but still useful if you want to know the icky details. For installation you need to know palo is different from lilo in two important ways:

  1. palo can boot a kernel right out of a normal Linux “ext2” disk partition – no need to run palo every time the kernel changes.

  2. palo needs a special disk partition for itself because of the way PA-RISC firmware works, so read the next section.

Disk Partitions

During your Debian install, you will be asked to partition a disk. If you have multiple disks, you might want to read the information about disk names in the “HP-UX and Linux” section above.

You must place two special partitions on your boot disk and they must fit entirely within the first 2Gbytes of your disk. The first special partition is the “palo” partition, which will hold the secondary boot loader image and a Linux kernel. We usually call this the “recovery” kernel because you’ll usually boot a kernel out of a normal partition, but in an emergency you can use this one.

I usually recommend 16Mb for the palo partition because it can optionally hold a second kernel and a ramdisk image, but 8Mb is just fine if you want to save space. The numeric (hex) code for the palo partition is “f0”. When you are in the disk partitioning tool you must change the type of your intended palo partition to “f0”.

The next special partition is the one which will be a normal ext2 file system where you’ll be storing your kernel. If your disk is larger than 2Gbytes, it’s convenient to make a small partition which will be mounted as /boot which is contained within the first 2Gbytes of the disk. I often use a 32-Mbyte /boot partition so I can keep several kernels around.

After this you’ll want to add the usual Linux partitions – one or more swap partitions and one or more ext2 partitions. They are not required to be within the first 2 Gbytes or anything. Here’s a working setup as shown by cfdisk, the partitioning program used by the Debian installer.

                             Disk Drive: /dev/sda
                           Size: 73407865856 bytes
             Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 8924
   Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type          [Label]        Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   sda1                    Primary   Linux/PA-RISC boot                  24.68
   sda2                    Primary   Linux ext2                          41.13
   sda3                    Primary   Linux swap                         542.87
   sda5                    Logical   Linux ext3                        2155.03
   sda6                    Logical   Linux ext3                        2155.03
   sda7                    Logical   Linux ext3                       68483.69