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Offline AMIGA-FANTopic starter

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AMITHLON not running on my PC
« on: October 02, 2003, 08:11:38 PM »
Hi everybody, I am having the following problem in getting Amithlon to run on a second PC I own at home (a P4 @2.4Ghz) : this has an on-board GFX card, a basic VGA/EGA I guess: I have installed a spare GEForce2 MX400 which does work correctly under Windows XP. This card has been simply installed on the main mother-board, without making any adjustment at BIOS level to have the first on-board GFX card disabled (I think this is done automatically). I have only been able to run Amithlon on this second PC with the emubox.gz kernel, while on the first PC (a P3 @733 Mhz) my setup was as to use newemubox instead because I wanted to use the full GFX capabilities of the GeForce 2. On top of that it appears that by using emubox I loose the serial ports (I copied over the complete AMIGA environment from my first PC to the second one) and while I can use GENESIS through amithlon1_com device on the first PC, GENESIS cannot properly initialise this device on the second one. I'm therefore unable to use INTERNET and Email on this setup. By running "loadlin ..." with console_level=4 for diagnostic purposes, I found that at a certain point the system gets halted with a message like this:

esafb: abort, cannot reserve video memory at 0x50000000
PCI: device 00.1f.1 not available because of resource collisions
kernel panic: cannot mount VFS. Unable to mount root fs on 01:00

The message regarding the video memory shows up even on my first PC but the boot procedure goes on and I can get the entire Amithlon environment up and running.

By booting Amithlon with different configurations, such as "loadlin @SYSLINUX.cfg", therefore with different defaults I got instead different messages relating to the presence of a DVD-ROM that could not be properly mounted.

Apart from that, I think that the same configuration used in the first PC should run even on the second one, therefore thorugh newemubox rather than emubox.

Anyone has any clue as to what could be the problem?

Many thanks and regards for your ideas.



  ;-)  :-o  ;-)
 

Offline bhoggett

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #1 on: October 02, 2003, 08:24:47 PM »
@AMIGA-FAN

You should put this question to the mailing lists, and preferably with a few more details. From what you say it sounds like a hardware incompatibility at motherboard level, but that's just a wild guess. There may be a way round it.

The emubox.gz kernel still has full support for GeForce2 cards. It's the GeForce3 that need the newemubox.gz kernel, but the new kernel also has improved serial capabilities compared to the original. You will also not be able to use any of the contrib3 or 3b upgrades without the new kernel.

Try the amithlonopen yahoo group. Bernie and some of the other kernel hackers lurk on there.
Bill Hoggett
 

Offline AMIGA-FANTopic starter

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #2 on: October 02, 2003, 09:09:06 PM »
Thank you for your quick reply. I'm using, on my primary PC, the newemubox kernel precisely because of the improved seial capabilities but also because seemed to run better than the original emubox, which is why I would want to use the newemubox even on the second one. Still is not clear to me why GENESIS (or MIAMI) cannot initialize the serial device (is amithlon1_com.device part of the contrib3? I can't remember). which device shall I use in place of amithlon1_com when using emubox (perhaps powercom.device?).

Thanks.

 

Offline AMIGA-FANTopic starter

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #3 on: October 02, 2003, 10:13:17 PM »
Sorry everybody, perhaps it wasn't that clear from my first post, that the problem is clearly due to the fact that Amithlon doesn't even start on my P4 but gets halted at a certain point of the boot process if I use newemubox as kernel: I have then to resort to a hard reset of the PC. Amithlon DOES start instead if I use emubox.

I have joined the amithlonopen YAHOO group to see if I can find any answer to this problem, but, anyway, any other suggestions will be very much appreciated.

Thanks.
 

Offline bhoggett

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #4 on: October 02, 2003, 10:20:57 PM »
@AMIGA-FAN

You will usually get your questions answered on the ML, or at least an attempt will be made to locate the problem.

I don't know why newemubox.gz fails on your P4, but then I don't have a P4, so perhaps I wouldn't come across the problem at all. There may be an easy fix.

As for the serial device to use with emubox.gz, that's powercom.device. The amithlon1_com.device needs the newemubox.gz kernel as I believe it's part of the contrib3 update.
Bill Hoggett
 

Offline Dr_Bombcrater

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #5 on: October 16, 2003, 02:38:23 AM »
Amiga-Fan, is your P4 machine a Dell by any chance?
--
Gary \\"Dr Bombcrater\\" Colville
 

Offline AMIGA-FANTopic starter

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #6 on: October 21, 2003, 11:43:50 PM »
No, it's not a Dell Computer, it's a genuine Intel P4, with a SOLTEK motherboard. I have posted these same Emails to amithlonopen YAHOO groups, which I believe, is probably the best place where I can get proper answers to such technical problems. If you join that group, you'll have access to all AMITHLON related matters, including mine.


Regards.
 

Offline fx

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #7 on: October 22, 2003, 12:33:54 AM »
>kernel panic: cannot mount VFS. Unable to mount root fs on 01:00

ehmm, I really don't know anything about Amithlon but doesn't that message mean that the kernel can't find any filesystem to mount? have you tried giving loadlin the parameter root=/dev/hd* where you have your root filesystem?
Slightly bored and severly confused..
 

Offline AMIGA-FANTopic starter

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #8 on: October 22, 2003, 05:40:29 PM »
Well, I have re-checked the file "AMITHLON" and found that the string  'initrd=....? somehow went missing from the entire command line for loadlin. The "root=/dev/ram0' parameter was correct. After correcting the problem, I managed to launch AMITHLON with the newemubox as I wanted but I also wanted to check the other problem I found with this setup, i.e. the amithlon1_com device which seems not working properly, unlike on my other P3. The reason why I wanted to use the newemubox was infact to be able to use the amithlon1_com device, simply because the powercom device doesn't work. Now, I found that I'm still stuck with that problem. With GENESIS, the dialup connection doesn't complete as it hangs at the time of getting the 'host name & domain name'; same problem with MIAMI. The strange fact is that on the other PC (the Pentium 3) everything is working fine: I have doubòe-checked all settings in GENESIS and MIAMI and they are all the same as in my new P4. Now, I'm therefore able to use the newemubox as I wanted to, therefore with faster and better GFX, but I'm still stuck with the dialup problem: until this is fixed, I'm not able to use INTERNET or Emails on thsi machine.

Regards.
 

Offline AMIGA-FANTopic starter

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Re: AMITHLON not running on my PC
« Reply #9 on: October 29, 2003, 02:11:13 PM »
Hi everybody, following my previous posts regarding GENESIS not completing the dialup process on my P4, after experimenting a while I finally managed to get it to work and just wanted to share with you what I discovered: If you have a P4 and want to run Amithlon and use the INTERNET either with MIAMI or GENESIS, DO INSTALL the following 2 patches (under s:Amithlon_patches) from amithlon_contrib2.lha:

   patch1_p4.o
   patch2_vec.o

With these 2 patches GENESIS will no longer hang during the dialup process at the time of obtaining the HOST NAME and DOMAIN NAME and will succesfully put you on the NET.

Regards.