Welcome, traveller

Some frequently asked questions about Linux, Debian and UBoot on the AmigaOne hardware:
Is there a list of supported hardware?

Yes, at http://web.amigarulez.com/ahs you'll find a database of supported hardware. If you find hardware not on this list, or know that the status has changed, contact me (olegil at samfundet.no) and we'll see about including it. Note that all the info you see there is useful, so try to fill out all the comments typically used on the site in an email to me.

If I use swap in OS4, will I need to shut down properly, like Linux and other "toy" OSes?

No. Having a swap partition is not the reason why you need to shut down those other systems, so it won't affect how AmigaOS can be shut down by simply flicking the switch. I mean the Excute/Mode/Ready.

UAE, mouse. What's the deal? It's unusable.

Press F12 + G in one go to lock the mouse pointer to the UAE window. Or try out mousehack, which is distributed with UAE (typically /usr/share/uae/tools/mousehack under Linux). It's an amiga program that makes the mouse follow the X mouse pointer.

UAE clock ticking too fast.

This is a bug in the Picasso96 emulation. Stick with ECS for now :-(

UPDATE (AGAIN)

Richard Drummond has fixed this, except for a small bug when using 32b P96 on 32b X. So if you can live with that, but want to try out the rest of his features, go to http://www.rcdrummond.net/uae and download the version you need there. He now provides debian packages for both Woody and sid (which currently should be ok with Sarge as well).

How do I see which version of glibc I'm running?
The GNU C library can be run as an application from a shell, it will then give you the version information. Type /lib/libc.so.6 in any shell, and it'll tell you which version it is, which version of GCC it was built with, and some extra info that might come in handy some day.
Garbled console if I run X 4.3 in non-fb mode on a Radeon. Is there a fix?
This should only be needed in 2.4.19. The 2.4.21 kernel fixes it. After X has started, the framebuffer is garbled, so we need to reinitialize the framebuffer. Do this by issuing the command fbset with some options (for instance fbset 640x480@60 should do the trick).
I have installed the sound modules for my card, but programs still complain about no /dev/dsp. Fix?
You're missing the snd-pcm-oss module. Alsa does not speak /dev/dsp natively (thank god ;-) ), so you must provide the OSS emulation layer for this. Modprobe snd-pcm-oss should do the trick. /dev/mixer is provided by snd-mixer-oss, but snd-pcm-oss ought to depend on this so modprobe will install it for you automatically.
How do I reconfigure network settings?
"man interfaces" is as usual a good place to start (note that I didn't say RTFM ;-) ). iface eth0 inet static followed by several lines with static IP setup, or replace static with dhcp for dhcp. If you can't use the name server on a dhcp system, try to apt-get remove dhcp-client and apt-get install pump instead. Stop the interfaces with: /etc/init.d/networking stop. Start them back up after changing the configuration with /etc/init.d/networking start.
Partitioning with RDB and installing kernel to a partition makes PPCBoot cough up blood with '** Invalid partition type "" (expect "PPCBoot")'. What should I do.
You'll need to use an MBR (they can coexist if you dare, but on another disk is preferable), bootable floppy, bootable CD or otherwise other non-RDB bootable media until you've upgraded your firmware.
My 9x00 Radeon doesn't work with Debian stable? (UPDATED Sep 21 2003).
XFree 4.1 is way too old for that, you'll want 4.3. 4.3 has been ported to unstable. The packages can be found at deb http://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main, but you'll need to use packages from unstable in your Debian as well... Just upgrading the whole shebang is often as good as just upgrading parts, so change every occurence of "stable" in your /etc/apt/sources.list to "unstable", and delete the security.debian.org entry (since there's never security patches for unstable, just new fixed versions).
(XE only). I had to set FSB to 100MHz to get memory to work properly. How do I set multiplier to 8x instead of 6x?

G4-XE module dips: x6 off off on off, x8 off off on on.

G3-XE module dips: x6 on off off on, x8 off on on on. Remember to short the jumpers as well (or you could end up with 0.5 too much (6.5/8.5).

What's the correct way to reconfigure X?
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86. Nothing else. Manual overrides are possible if you know what you're doing.
Why is dselect behaving so strange?
No idea, but you shouldn't be using that anyway. Kpackage is good, aptitude is good, apt-get is good, dselect is BAD. Tasksel is good for getting a preinstalled X/desktop environment/development system/etc with everything. But then you need some room...
What is sid, Sarge, and Woody?
Those are the names of the three Debian distributions unstable, testing and stable. Sarge will one day grow up to become stable, and then we'll get a fork from that to a new testing. Unstable is always sid, which stands for still in development. Spot the movie where the names came from. The names of previous stable distributions are Potato, Hamm, Slink.
How do I add packages from sid to Woody or Sarge?
By using Apt pinning, or adding unstable deb-src lines to sources.list. Apt pinning is explained below.
What is Apt pinning, and how is it done?

More on this later, for now see: Apt-Pinning for Beginners

Other useful tips: a value of more than 1000 (possibly including 1000) will FORCE these packages to be installed. This is used for DOWNGRADING from one distribution to another. It can some days be a LOT of work, but should work if you do enough iterations of apt-get dist-upgrade and apt-get -f install

How do I get my IDE cdrom burner to work in Linux?
Add this bit to your bootargs: hdx=ide-scsi, where x is the letter referencing the IDE drive. Eg for hdc: setenv bootargs $bootargs hdc=ide-scsi
How can I backup a partition to a file and/or another partition?

To file: tar -C <directory> -cl(|z|j)f <path-to-filename> . . The "." (dot) is important. To unpack this: tar -C <directory> -x(|z|j)f <path-to-filename>. No dot.

For moving things from one place to another, replace the filename with "-" and pipe one commands output into the other "command 1 | command 2". Eg backup of /usr, for moving to a separate disk (remember to go to single user mode first with init s, so the directory doesn't change when working on it. And complete the whole thing before leaving single user mode). The new partition for use as /usr is mounted on /mnt. tar -C /usr -clf - . | tar -C /mnt -xf -

Which memory configurations are supported by the Articia S?
Please refer to this table:
SbkRaddrCaddrMB
11188
111916
1111032
212832
212964
21210128
21211256
21311512
2139128
21310256
Sbk is the number of banks, RAddr and CAddr are row and column address bits, and MB is the resulting size of the module.
What's the pinout of the internal USB connector?

Refer to the following table:

 Pin 1Pin 2Pin 3Pin 4Pin 5
USB3+5-d+dgndxxx
USB4+5-d+dgndshl

Here, 'gnd' is data ground (uses an actual wire), 'xxx' is a missing pin, and 'shl' is shield ground. If your connectors have the shield ground it will look like an ugly wire as it's shrink tube over the USB cable's braided shield, twisted to act like a wire. I didn't use pin numbers because I don't remember the exact numbering scheme, but if you use the missing pin as a reference you should be fine. I'm not sure if it really makes a difference, but the row with the shield connection is USB3 and the row with the missing pin is USB4 (note that this entire header is controlled by the BIOS variable 'usb1_enable', and the two backplane connectors are controlled by the BIOS variable 'usb0_enable'. To enable the motherboard header either use the BIOS menu, or manually type 'setenv usb1_enable on' and then 'saveenv'. (Note the case.)

How do I enable the L2 cache?

Either: In UBoot, set the environment variable bootargs to include the phrase l2cr=0x80000000. Zero, x, eight, seven zeroes.

Or: In Linux, the kernel L2 driver can be controlled via the interface /proc/sys/kernel/l2cr. Just read the ascii string from the interface using cat /proc/sys/kernel/l2cr. If you want to change it, just overwrite the hex value with a new one with echo 'hexcode' > /proc/sys/kernel/l2cr. Enable with hex code 0x80000000, disable with 0x00000000.

OS4 will probably enable this by default.

What are the options for stdin and stdout in the firmware?

The variables are:

Lack of VGA card will set stdout=serial and Ctrl-F12 on PS/2 keyboards will set stdin=ps2 and stdout=vga (lack of VGA obviously overrides the latter). The option amikbd is for the PCI Catweasel, you cannot connect an Amiga keyboard to the PS/2 input.

I have 1GB memory in my AmigaOne and Linux crashes. Why?
You'll need to limit memory to 700 (or so, try 768 minus vgamemsize) Megs until this issue can be fixed in Linux. This is done by the menu in UBoot. See separate point about that below.
Printing doesn't work correctly. HELP!
Firstly, you'll need a VERY recent UBoot. July 09 should be a safe bet. Next you'll need to enter the menu in UBoot and set some parameters. Parallell port should be set to ECP or EPP, address 0x378. Then make sure the menu command is run every boot as mentioned in the next entry.
Printer settings and memory size doesn't get set unless I manually enter the menu and exit without changing anything. How do I make the menu settings become default?

You'll need to set some variables in UBoot. Here's a list:

This way, the countdown will be replaced by a progress bar, and if you don't interrupt it, the parameters that only exist in the menu program will be set and the machine will boot as normal.

OS4, when?
When it's done. ;-)

So, satisfied? No? Oh well, just wait a bit, ok?