Re: X on old (non-x86) Linux guests

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* BALATON Zoltan (balaton@eik.bme.hu) wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021, Andrew Randrianasulu wrote:
> > On Wednesday, April 28, 2021, Andrew Randrianasulu <randrianasulu@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > > On Monday, April 26, 2021, BALATON Zoltan <balaton@eik.bme.hu> wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 26 Apr 2021, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> > > > >  Over the weekend I got a Red Hat 6.x (not RHEL!) for Alpha booting
> > > > > under QEMU which was pretty neat.  But I failed to find a succesful
> > > > > combination to get X working; has anyone any suggestions?
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Adding Andrew who has experimented with old X framebuffer so he may
> > > > remember something more but that was on x86.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Sorry, I still away from my desktop (with notes/logs), not sure when
> > > return..
> > > I do not think I tried something that old.. Kernel 2.2 i guess, before any
> > > attempt at r128 drm Kernel module was written (in 2.4?) and so before ddx
> > > attempted to use that (as it tries by default in much newer distros)
> 
> Maybe it would work better with newer RedHat than 6.0? I think I've seen
> images up to at least 7.1 that supported alpha but I don't know how to boot
> them. I could get kernel and installer running with -kernel -initrd but did
> not find the CD on the defailt CMD646 controller (seems to only have driver
> for one SCSI controller) so I'm not sure how to try this. Trying to just
> boot from the CD without -kernel -initrd it just stops after displaying
> "Hello" in top left but that could be something about alpha firmware I don't
> know how to use.

I ended up using -kernel/-initrd and passed the cdrom as an image to hdb
rather than with -cdrom; as you say the cmd646 didn't like the cdrom.
(Where I'm pretty sure my real Alpha does have a CDROM connected to it's
cmd646).  And none of the SCSI controllers would work.

I'll make some notes on my command line this weekend and post them next
week; I'll try the X suggestions as well.

Dave

> Regards,
> BALATON Zoltan
> 
-- 
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@redhat.com / Manchester, UK