[Soekris] Installing OS's...

[Peter Seebach]

In message <20030515055717.GA16714 at speedy.unibe.ch>, Tobias Roth writes:
>On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 10:02:41PM -0500, Peter Seebach wrote:
>> So, due to a series of curious quirks, I'm having a surprisingly difficult
>> time loading Linux on a 4521.  The problem I'm running into is that the
>> machine on which I normally work with CF cards, my laptop, is a NetBSD box,
>> and doesn't have newfs_ext2.

>sysutils/e2fsprogs has an ext2 newfs. that still requires you to disklabel
>the disk, i think the standard fdisk should be able to do that, but I
>didn't try it.

Cool!  That'll help quite a bit.

>> So... I tried netbooting the Soekris, but was
>> unable to trick it into coming up (I frankly don't know why; it goes a littl
>e
>> ways, then starts spewing VAST quantities of control characters.

>wrong terminal speed. try 19200 which is the default for the 4521 (at least
>it was with mine). that is, this speed is for the bios. if you set a
>different speed in your kernel, change your serial line speed to that, then
>you will see garbage while the soekris is in the bios, and human readable
>text once the kernel takes over control. later, adjust either the bios
>or the kernel speed to match the other.

I thought that might be it, but 19200 is what I'm using.  It's also very
strangely consistent; I'll get xx*xxxx, where the x's are various control
characters, and '*' is whatever I just typed, every time I hit a key.

-s