I installed Debian 3.1 on my Cobalt Qube 3 this weekend using Tim Wiley’s excellent howto. I started with Ubuntu 6.04, but had some difficulties getting the kernel working properly. I had some success with an older 2.4 kernel, but I eventually switched back to Debian.

It doesn’t boot correctly now, but the 2.4 Cobalt kernel does load in second stage. The problem seems to be with the node /dev/console. After the second state kernel loads, which is the Cobalt 2.4 kernel, the system throws and error and reboots. The error is:
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

There are several possible reasons for this and I’ll post when I figure out what it is. I’ll post the whole session below. Another problems took some time to sort out- the Western Digital WD1200JB 120GB drive I’m using (I have two identical drives for RAID) wasn’t recognized. I had been using it with the jumper in the master position, but it only works in the cable select position. However, the full 512MB of memory are recognized. I expect I’ll try to solve the initial console problem above then switch drives and try to get Ubuntu with the 2.6 kernel working. There really isn’t any driving need to use the 2.6 kernel that I can think of, but I’d still like to try.

Also, it took some exploration to get minicom working over my USB to Serial cable. The trick is to use /dev/TTYUSB0 as the device. I set up minicom by ’sudo minicom -s -o’, set the parameters (115200 bps, 8-bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, /dev/TTYUSB0), saved the profile as qube, and run it with ’sudo minicom -o qube’.

Sun Cobalt - Smaller, Bluer, Better, and Free
Firmware version 2.10.3-ext3

Current date: Jan 08 02:10:19 UTC 2007
ROM build info: Thu Mar 11 08:51:36 MST 2004 .
System serial number: S2250518
System type: 3000 series system, Version 2 board
Silicon serial number: 8e000008a7189d01
Monitor: 153536 bytes
Memory: 512 MB
CPU: 1 processor(s) detected
CPU 0: AuthenticAMD 448MHz (4.5 x 100MHz host bus) [BSP]
Initializing flash: done
Flash Bank 0: AMD AM29F080B 1024KB (01:d5)
Flash Bank 1: not installed.
Mounting ROM fs: done
Initializing PCI: done
Initializing ethernet: 2 controller(s) found
Initializing IDE: found ALI M5229 at 00:78
spinning up second channel: done
scanning ide0: master
scanning ide1:
IDE: stabilizing spinup: 100%
Checking Memory: done

Press spacebar to enter ROM mode
Booting default method - From disk

First stage kernel (Linux): Decompressing - done
ERROR: cannot relocate with filesize 0
Second stage kernel: Decompressing - done
Linux version 2.4.19C7_III (root@kbuild.sfbay.sun.com) (gcc version egcs-2.91.64
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e801: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009f000 (usable)
BIOS-e801: 0000000000100000 - 0000000020000000 (usable)
512MB LOWMEM available.
On node 0 totalpages: 131072
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone(1): 126976 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: console=ttyS0,115200 ip=off
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 448.210 MHz processor.
Calibrating delay loop… 894.56 BogoMIPS
Memory: 512232k/524288k available (1473k kernel code, 9492k reserved, 978k data)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
Mount-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Buffer-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
CPU: L1 I Cache: 32K (32 bytes/line), D cache 32K (32 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 128K (32 bytes/line)
CPU: AMD-K6(tm)-III Processor stepping 04
Checking ‘hlt’ instruction… OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
mtrr: detected mtrr type: AMD K6
PCI: Using configuration type 1
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)
Unknown bridge resource 0: assuming transparent
Unknown bridge resource 1: assuming transparent
Unknown bridge resource 2: assuming transparent
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
VFS: Disk quotas vdquot_6.5.1
SGI XFS snapshot 2.4.19-2002-08-03_04:15_UTC with ACLs, realtime, quota, no debd
i2c-core.o: i2c core module version 2.6.4 (20020719)
i2c-dev.o: i2c /dev entries driver module version 2.6.4 (20020719)
i2c-proc.o version 2.6.4 (20020719)
i2c-ali15×3.o version 2.6.4 (20020719)
i2c-ali15×3.o: ALI15X3 SMBus Controller detected and initialized
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with HUB-6 MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_d
ttyS00 at 0×03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0×02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e
Non-volatile memory driver v1.2
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ALI15X3: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 78
ALI15X3: chipset revision 193
ALI15X3: 100% native mode on irq 14
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfdd0-0xfdd7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xfdd8-0xfddf, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
hda: WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0, SN=WD-WMA8C2215520, FWREV=16.06V16WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0e
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ide0 at 0xfdf8-0xfdff,0xfdf6 on irq 14
hda: setmax LBA 234375120, native 234375000
hda: 234375000 sectors (120000 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=232514/16/63, (U)DMA
Partition check:
hda: [PTBL] [14589/255/63] hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4
Cronyx Ltd, Synchronous PPP and CISCO HDLC (c) 1994
Linux port (c) 1998 Building Number Three Ltd & Jan “Yenya” Kasprzak.
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
sym53c8xx: at PCI bus 0, device 14, function 0
sym53c8xx: 53c875 detected
sym53c875-0: rev 0×4 on pci bus 0 device 14 function 0 irq 12
sym53c875-0: ID 7, Fast-20, Parity Checking
scsi0 : sym53c8xx-1.7.3c-20010512
md: raid0 personality registered as nr 2
md: raid1 personality registered as nr 3
md: raid5 personality registered as nr 4
raid5: measuring checksumming speed
8regs : 423.200 MB/sec
32regs : 363.200 MB/sec
pII_mmx : 812.800 MB/sec
p5_mmx : 777.600 MB/sec
raid5: using function: pII_mmx (812.800 MB/sec)
md: md driver 0.90.0 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun …
md: … autorun DONE.
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
IP: routing cache hash table of 4096 buckets, 32Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 131072 bind 65536)
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
cryptoapi: loaded
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 92k freed
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
<6>disabling network interfaces.
Rebooting in 5 seconds..waiting for devices to flush……….done

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 8:00 pm and is filed under qube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.