[WBEL-devel] Running WBEL/RHEL on RS/6000

[Rusman E. Priyana]

Hi,

At work we have a few IBM RS/6000 7025-F50 lying around.
I thought it may be a good idea for me to try running Linux on it.
Since I am a big fan of WBEL, I was thinking of trying to compile WBEL on it.
For start I thought I can install a taroon beta ppc.

I bumped into a few problems:
1) the taroon-ppc beta CD can't boot on the F50
It turns out that the Power_604 chip is 32 bit, while taroon's boot cd 
kernel is an ELF 64 bit MSB executable.
Even Fedora ppc vmlinuz files (not the ppc64) turns out to be ELF 64.

2) I looked around for other distro that might boot on F50, and tried 
Debian Sarge for ppc
It turns out that the CD structure was not compatible with F50.
I managed to remake the iso, following RedHat's way of using 
\ppc\bootinfo.txt and modifying the yaboot.conf to rever to the correct 
devalias for the cdrom device.
I managed to install Debian Sarge and running fine now, although no X for now.

3) I tried to combine the Sarge CD bootup vmlinux with the taroon CD,
turns out it seems the kernel can't mount the taroon's ramdisk.image (gz or 
no gz).
I tried to do the other way round, trying to incorporate the content of the 
ramdisk.image into a sarge initrd.
The initrd in Sarge seems to be of cramfs.
Somehow that initrd, was said to be cramfs, when queried using "file" 
command in Debian F50.
The same initrd file was said to be "data", when queried using file command 
in WBEL on intel box.

Questions:
does anyone know how to compile a new 32 bit kernel used to boot taroon 
ppc?  or how to get one.
I believe the kernel config is different from the standard installable kernel.
Can a 32bit ppc kernel be compiled on an x86?
Or can it be compiled in a debian on ppc?

I need to get taroon ppc CD to boot on an F50 (32 bit).


Thanks.

Rusman