Stick-on pointy beard and musical armpit sandals

[hirez]

So. Were a chap desirous of building a Beardian installer ISO that had the sense to recognise AMI Megaraid/HP NetRaid cards, like, maybe, every other blasted OS available (With the possible exception of DECX and RT11/M), where would be a good place to start?

Other than www.freebsd.org. Much as I'd like to use a real OS on these boxes, none of the BSDs are maintainable by anyone other than me.

DeadRat's out because it's a right lash-up.

God. It's going to be U-riceboy-u, isn't it? I had to build a Linux kernel for the first time in six years yesterday and I still feel unclean.

Comments

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Can't you do it using OpenSolaris, as in making a JumpStart ISO? Not something I've ever done, but I think the device builds are pretty decent.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Um. Given where I work (HP Labs), running Sun s/w would be... Hugely entertaining. You're a bad influence. I hope you're suitably ashamed. (ie - not very much)

Mind, I've got an OpenBSD installer for HP-PA. Yes, OpenBSD runs on Humppa!

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

OpenBSD on HP? Crumbs. Soon you'll be saying OSX runs on x86!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It turns out that getting BSD to run on my old PA-RISC workstation is significantly less hassle than getting OpenSlow to boot on, well, anything.

[reddragdiva]

u*u is something else entirely. I presume you mean funroll-loops leegnux.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I probably do.

Ubuntu-latest is the familiar Beardian installer, but it fails to find both the Raid card and the NIC.

funroll-loops is downloading now. The shame of it.

[reddragdiva]

That's odd, it's been remarkably good with hardware in my experience. Ah well.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It is odd. It's Beardian, albeit a more recent kernel, but still...

Meanwhile, Memtest86 has thrown up a dodgy DIMM. Today is not the day for playing with hardware.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Some Gentoo later]

Dear Christ that's horrible. Do people use this crap out of choice?

[reddragdiva]

Does your car have a 90hp engine but a six-foot spoiler on the back?

[ ] Yes
[ ] No

Spoilers make cars go faster rather than slower.

[ ] True
[ ] False

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, quite.

But it's been an article of faith with the turd-lobbing Linux monkeys that the FreeBSD installer is the worst thing in the world.

(Insert JH-R's standard and increasingly brusque explanation that if you're judging an OS by the installer, you've pretty much demonstrated that you're not qualified to hold a valid opinion.)

However, the Gentoo 'installation' plumbs new depths in 'You have to be that much of a smelly oik to use this'.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Knoppix or one of the many variants thereof? I'd have thought that someone would have tried to make a rescue disk based around it for aforementioned storage devices...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Knoppix 4.x failed to spot the RAID card. Well, it nearly worked.

The fix was to use the 2.4 kernel on an 'Etch' net-boot CD in expert mode.

It would seem that since it's an old product, recent and 'improved' MegaRaid drivers don't work at all.

I need to do another one tomorrow, so it'll be educational to see if a standard Beardian 3.1 (sarge?)/2.4 kernel CD will work.

I now know a lot more about several flavours of Linux and I'm damn well staying here in sensible BSD land.

[spride.livejournal.com]

Any mileage in Darwin?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Plenty, probably. I'd really like an excuse to play with it. I'd like to find out if development on it is as much 'fun' as with KDE/Qt.

However, I've got to build boxes that the rest of the team can stand a chance of fixing if I get run over by a bus. We decided to standardise on Beardian quite a while ago, and modulo this particular hardware (which will cease to be a problem as the obsolete kit quietly goes), it's not been a decision anyone's had cause to regret. It got rid of all the effing rpm-based systems for a start. Stuff Just Works, and if you play by the package-management rules, it'll continue to work without handholding.