| Debian AMD64 22 February 2004 Status The pure 64-bit Debian port is ready and installed (though not official). Monitors should be switched from TwinView to Xinerama -- cf. nVidia Software and guides
Prefer sarge:Installation history Update 1 March 2005 In Raid tests I discover that Linux software RAID, also known as MD (multiple devices) is way better (faster) than 3ware's own hardware RAID! Wow. The testers have nearly the same card, 8506-8 (I have 8506-12). So you should find out if you can run the new drives (when you get them) with software RAID. They are of course hooked up to the 3ware escalade card, but the card can presumably be instructed to treat each drive individually, and then software RAID ties them together. See RAID (local). Update 19 February 2005: TV capture and sound card Just catching up on the updates. During the Xmas break 2004, I learned that you can get PCI-X sound cards, and bought a SoundBlaster Audigy2 Value 24-bit that fit in one of the PCI-X slots (see Sound). That freed up the 32-bit PCI slot, which I then resumed using for the TV card. I wrote a two-part capture script, /ssa/TV/scripts/cron-jobs/channel and channel-timestamp, and programmed the jobs using cron. I also installed freeguide, a Java application, to view the schedules. With minor tweaks -- I needed to leave 15 seconds for the card to switch channels -- this system has operated flawlessly since 6 January, and provided me with teaching materials and my students with project material. I'm using mencoder to capture, which is good but could likely be better -- I get a slow drift in synchronization, and the quality is not the greatest. I just discovered the sync problem is solved in playback by adding the -sync 30 parameter. I also added this to the kplayer configuration, under Advanced. On testing xine-engined kaffeine, however, I find the sync problem is gone there too -- maybe it was a player artifact? Mencoder is still not using mmx for some reason, though it says "Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX SSE." As more and more people are starting to use amd64 and mplayer, xvid, transcode, mythtv, and other projects are gradually being ported and optimized. Update 24 November 2004: BIOS Flash and VMware update I flashed the BIOS with version 2.02 08.00.08, dated 10/14/03, ID 0ABCF007. I had to set up the boot sequence in the CMOS to use a floppy driver, plug in a floppy device -- it was very hard to find where to do that -- and make the disks in WinXP, but everything went well. I made several changes to the BIOS, mainly the following:
When I enabled ACPI in the kernel and then typed "reboot", the machine halted. So that's not right either... Reboot still works fine in Windows, however, so it may be an ACPI problem rather than a BIOS problem. I updated VMware to use the chroot version of lib32, so that's now working. The machine is now incredibly useful -- it runs a superfast Linux remotely that I use for most large applications; it runs all my storage needs; it runs VMware for remote WinXP within Linux; and it runs dual-screen Linux locally with anvil video analysis software; finally it runs a kickass WinXP gaming platform with 1140fps glxgears and great sound on dual monitors. All in one machine, generally extremely stable -- though I've had it freeze hard mysteriously twice. Short of that it's an incredible workhorse; you're really getting value for the extra expense of solid hardware. It's also nice that it doesn't do everything -- for instance, cyberspace is serving tikiwiki and some of my web stuff (not much), and keeping all my software on /vc; while spello is now a samba server, Tord's backup, teeclub storage -- several things. Gubbio is doing MythTV -- god forbid doing that on clitunno. So clitunno tested that capture and live compression works; after the demo, I ripped out all that and put the fast gaming card with a sound card instead. The big new thing is the video card -- getting a powerful dual screen is an unexpected bonus. Now it's worth noting that support for that card became official only a few days ago -- so there was no downside waiting. There are a few things that still haven't been ported to amd64, such as xvid, transcode, and mjpegtools, but the tv grabbing went extremely well, showing that bttv and ffmpeg have been fully ported. Since you solved the problem -- and elegantly so -- the problem of turning the dual opteron server into a gaming platform, you don't need to buy another computer now. What you still need to do is verify that your laptop's CD drive works, and also DHCP in the classrooms. You may need to send it off to repairs. But at least you now have another dual-screen video analysis and gaming machine! Update 23 November 2004: installed video and audio cards While most PCI cards won't fit in a PCI-X slot, video cards do, and work fine. I therefore installed a fast GeForce FX-5500 PCI card in one of the PCI-X slots, and the old SoundBlaster Live! card in the PCI slot; both work great! It turns out the GeForce is dual head, so I attached both flatscreen monitors. This will be great for video analysis and game capture. I inaugurated the setup by capturing The Sims Online live. Everything is working. For switching from TwinView to Xinerama, see nVidia -- this would be a good idea. When installing the video drivers in WinXP I discovered that I can use Spello's DVD player through Samba for installing direct from a CD, so we should be able to do this with games too. November 2004: moving to chroot, installing anvil To make the Java Media Framework run on Clitunno, I switched over to the chroot, installing java 1.4.2 and JMF and Firefox (with Java plugin), and OpenOffice -- and then uninstalling OpenOffice from the main root: ia32-libs-openoffice.org openoffice.org openoffice.org-amd64 openoffice.org-debian-files openoffice.org-help-en openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us openoffice.org-l10n-enBasically I made things work. I can now run Anvil on the local machine as a non-root user, and similarly OpenOffice and Firefox. I haven't moved vmware yet, so that won't be working. To run Anvil as a non-root user, just type anvil in konsole (I couldn't make it work from an icon). It's not useful to run it remotely, as the video can't handle it. To run X11 apps as root, try issuing this as root: xauth merge /home/<your login>/.XauthorityThis will add your credentials to root credentials and user steen will be able to run as root (not tested). I need a soundcard, a video card, and a large monitor. Update 10 November 2004: nVidia drivers Harald Dunkel <harald.dunkel@t-online.de> wrote in a personal mail: Hi folks,Update 9 November 2004 -- how to install a IA32 chroot system [I first installed the full chroot but realized I didn't need it and kept using /emul after all. Here are the notes from the installation -- this was all undone afterwards.] I followed the instructions on alioth. I contemplated running sarge, but decided to stick with sid. I issued debootstrap --arch i386 sid /var/chroot/sid-ia32 ftp://ftp.debian.org/debianand eventually got "Base system installed successfully." I edited /etc/ld.so.conf, removing the existing lines for the /emul solution: /emul/ia32-linux/liband adding these new lines: /var/chroot/sid-ia32/libI then added a link to the 32bit linker in the /lib path: cd /libThe file ld-linux.so.2 was already a symlink (ld-linux.so.2 -> /emul/ia32-linux/lib/ld-linux.so.2), so I deleted the old symlink and created the new one. I ran ldconfig. I then copied over /etc/passwd, shadow, and group, as well as apt/sources.list. To install applications in the 32-bit chroot, issue chroot /var/chroot/sid-ia32and proceed as usual. I ran update and installed wajig. Now, OpenOffice and vmware would need to be reinstalled for the chroot version -- any others? To install packages, copy them to /var/chroot/sid-ia32/root/debs or use wajig. To run 32-bit applications, leave chroot and install dchroot. Edit /etc/dchroot.conf by adding: # ia32 chrootLet's say you want to run wma2wav (after installing it in chroot), issue dchroot -c ia32 -d wma2wavThat segfaulted. Since converting wma to wav files had been the reason I wanted a chroot, I reverted to the /emul setup and verified that ooWriter is working again. Update 23 October 2004 -- running 32-bit apps in pure64 If there are more applications you'd like to run in 32-bit mode (firefox, for instance, so that you can use the 32-bit plugins), you can install them using dchroot. This is documented in the Debian amd64 howto -- here is the quick version: apt-get install dchrootAdd the following to /etc/dchroot.conf: ia32 /emul/ia32-linuxIf /home, /tmp and /proc are mounted in the chroot using 'bind' mounts then both local files and the X11 display and process listing will be available from within the chroot. This is easily set up with the following. In /etc/fstab: /proc /emul/ia32-linux/proc none bind 0 0With this in place it is trivially easy to apt install into the chroot. sudo dchroot apt-get updateAnd to run it is also easy. (The -d is needed when $DISPLAY is needed.) dchroot -d firefoxA script such as the following will generically run in the chroot. I called it 'ia32-exec' and link it to program names that I always want to run in the 32-bit space such as firefox and openoffice. #!/bin/shThen use it with symlinked program names like this: ln -sf ia32-exec /usr/local/bin/openofficeThese instructions were contributed to the Debian-amd64 list by Bob Proulx on 23 October 2004. Update 22 October 2004 Finally figured out how to install Openoffice.org:
The kernel should from now on be compiled with gcc 3.4; I changed the symlink. However, later people said that once amd64 becomes official, it will be using gcc-3.3. Update 20 September 2004 There's a customer advisory from 3ware warning about a firmware problem on 8506. The problem arises only if the controller card is running in 66MHz mode, which mine probably isn't. Firware version 1.05.00.063 has the fix, and in the bootup menu, I read Escalade 8506-12So my firmware has the fix and more. For command-line tools, see RAID. To set up a new RAID configuration, press Alt-3. Update 13 September 2004 I decide to start over, now that the port is available. After reformatting /dev/hda5 and mounting it on /deb, I follow instructions and issue: cdebootstrap --arch amd64 sid /deb/ http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/pure64/Well, neither cdebootstrap nor debootstrap exists on my SuSE 9.0 system, so I'd have to build it. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_0.2.44.tar.gzI got debootstrap_0.2.44_amd64.deb in /root/work and issued ar -xf debootstrap-- this pulled the package into four files. Then install them with this: cd /Wow! Installed in /usr/sbin/debootstrap. May not work of course. I issued, /usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch amd64 sid /mnt/deb http://bach.hpc2n.umu.se/pure64I got errors on these: Errors were encountered while processing:Then I issued, LOGNAME=root chroot /mnt/deband added the stuff below to sources.list, copied over /etc/resolv.conf, filled in /etc/network/interfaces, and edited /etc/hostname. On installing wajig (yeah!), I was prompted for keyboard, selected from full list, and then issued "export LC_ALL=C" and "just reinstall console-data", problem solved. So I now have a Debian installation, bare-boned, but should be ready for a switch-over. On installing the new 2.6.8 kernel, lots of errors -- and eventually realized I had forgotten to install module-init-tools. Everything else was working well, but I now have a monolithic kernel almost without modules, as I worked my way around this problem. Then the broadcomm module, built from bcm5700-source, oopsed repeatedly. Lots of people have this problem, but the tg3 driver in the kernel should work better, so I recompiled. This time I included some new ACPI material (I haven't been able to nail down what exactly the problem is), which caused an oops on boot. So this looks like it works -- I'm off SuSE and on Debian. Note that if you have the i2c sensors compiled and loaded, you should see displays of temperatures on booting. I ended up installing the vanilla kernel with 2.6.9-rc2 patches, as it was unclear if the tg3 firmware was needed. In the end I think not; it's fine to stick with the Debian kernel. Looks nice and stable. The storage server is now moved over to Debian, and everything tested is working -- the RAID volumes mount and can be mounted on other machines, and X-windows works fine remotely (not fully tested locally). Abandoned paths I tried another avenue: downloading the netboot image: wget http://www.be.kernel.org/amd64/alioth/install-images/sid-amd64-netboot.iso (in seconds, and updated)I created a directory called /root/loop and issued: mount -o loop -t iso9660 sid-amd64-netboot.iso loopWorked! But how do you play it? No idea. I surely don't have to burn an image and install from it? Here's a note on the installer: Keep in mind that the amd64 port is still not in the official archives, but the installer is already configured to work as if it was. Thus, you have to point it to alioth or a mirror when it comes to downloading packages: Choose http as protocol. Then choose the first option which will let you enter the information. Enter the host as "debian.inode.at" or "debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org" or "bach.hpc2n.umu.se" or "bytekeeper.as28747.net". Enter the directory as "/pure64" on the next screen. Enter the proxy, if any, on the next screen. Choose unstable as the distribution. There are no stable or testing distributions available so far. Testing will become available within the next few weeks, as soon as the scripts on alioth are ready.Update 6 May 2004 I see note that the location of pure64 packages is now deb http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/pure64/ sid mainI keep the machine mostly off, so this is not yet updated. For updated instructions, see http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2004/debian-amd64-200402/msg00216.htmlBasically you can start with the tarball from John's site, or do a chroot as described here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2004/04/msg00111.html-- or can you build on what you already have in place. You also need to build a 64bit kernel: https://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/1314/21/debian-amd64-howto.html#id2429788Here's a report: I did a 64bit installation into a chroot like that a couple of days ago, but using cdebootstrap, but otherwise like all the other steps described in the e-mail. I had to compile some packages for my own to get all dependencies met after the installation, but that is not a big problem, since most of the packages are building out of the box, and the two which did not just lacked a -lresolv at the link line (maybe a bug?).On 1 March 2004 I got ssh working, thanks to rebuilt packages from Alex Perry, so the debian chroot is now running sshd. Alex also built a kernel, but this is for his emachines M6805 laptop -- I don't understand yet what is required to build a kernel and will stay away from it until I do. I also updated libxrender1, but I don't think I can run x-windows from chroot. There are still a lot of packages missing before this is a full installation. On 22 February 2004 I read this from John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> on the Debian-AMD64 mailing list: You may download a pure 64-bit environment from:Following these instructions, I installed Debian AMD64 in /mnt/debroot, aka /deb. I first moved the untarred packages up one level, so that they're straight on the root of the partition -- in the future, I'll be able to refer to it more simply in lilo. Then I issued: cd /mntAt this point I got a bash-2.05b prompt! I'm in Debian I guess! cd /etc/aptThen I had to do some other things not on the list: mkdir -p archives/partial (otherwise apt-get update wouldn't run)I added this: auto loAll the modules are still loaded in this chroot environment. # ifconfigLooks promising. I ping sigillo and it works! I then modify /etc/resolv.conf: search sscnet.ucla.eduAt that point I was ready: apt-get updateI issue cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | moreand see lots of Arch: all and then some AMD64 packages. cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | grep amd64.debgets me all of the latter. I install nano and dpkg, both with perl warnings about missing locale settings. You have the locale package -- how is it reconfigured? I issued this on sigillo: just -s -t reconfigure localesand got the right command: dpkg-reconfigure 'locales'in the locales-english package. I get this: Choose which locales to generate. The selection will be saved to `/etc/locale.gen', which youYou could chose 98. en_US ISO-8859-1 or 100. en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8. On sigillo I have the latter, so I select that and say set as default. I then issued: LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8When I now type "locale" I get a clean entry. See this guide for more. ssh messes up -- see details here -- I didn't bother to fix it myself, as it should be in the repositories soon. I copy over /etc/hosts (cut and paste), and I'm set -- aside from the fact that ssh isn't working! I copy over ~/.bashrc in the same way and get a nice prompt and aliases. Then when I asked for man to get manuals, it suggested groff, and groff in turn dragged in these: defoma fontconfig groff groff-base libfontconfig1 libfreetype6 libice6 libnewt0.51 libpopt0 libsm6 libx11-6 libxaw7 libxext6 libxft1 libxi6 libxmu6 libxmuu1 libxp6 libxpm4 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxt6 libxtrap6 libxtst6 man-db ttf-bitstream-vera whiptail xfree86-common xlibs xlibs-dataX-windows! I took them and they installed without a whimper! Including font-related stuff galore. Wow! I then got sysutils debianutils module-init-tools libvorbisfile3 libvorbis-dev memstat sharutils libjpeg62 gcc-3.3 libdvdread3 divxcomp jpeginfo kernel-kbuild-2.6-1 libc6-dev nfs-common liba52-0.7.4 bzip2 libglib1.2 libmpeg3-1 ncurses-bin perl-base cpp-3.3 ogmtools tcl8.4-dev apt libaudiofile-dev libmagic1 libpam-modules fping base-files libfam0c102 portmap libvorbisenc2 hdparm e2fslibse2fsprogs at checkinstall deborphan installwatchAgain, completely clean! Now if I only had wajig... Finally I run apt-get -u dist-upgrade (I should have done this at the beginning), and run into a problem described on the mailing list: the symlink from lib to lib64 disappears, so nothing works. I exit chroot, reestablish the link, and it's fine again. More packages -- picked from what wajig needs: apt-move dash dpkg-repack gconf2 gkdebconf gksu libatk1.0-0 libdps1 libgconf2-4 libgcrypt1 libgksu0 libgnutls7 libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-common libidl0 liblzo1 libncursesw5 liborbit2 libpango1.0-0 libpango1.0-common libtasn1-0 libxcursor1 libxft2 libxml2 libxv1 lynxreportbug wget xbase-clients xlibmesa-gl xlibmesa-glu xtermThe machine seems really fast. Now what is missing to be able to boot into this?
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