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The following is a technical recipe or "howto" document for one successful procedure to install the Red Hat Linux distribution onto a Sun Cobalt Qube 3 model internet appliance.
Warning! Use this procedure at your own risk.
- Red Hat on a Qube 3: Introduction
- Using Flashtool to Upgrade Qube 3 Proms
- Inside the Cobalt GenIII Kernel RPM, Part 1: Preparing a Sandbox
- Inside the Cobalt GenIII Kernel RPM, Part 2: Making the Ext3 Patch
- Inside the Cobalt GenIII Kernel RPM, Part 3: Building to Spec
- Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 1: Stock Distribution
- Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 2: Customization for Cobalt
- Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 3: Booting the Qube 3
- Ideas for Managing Red Hat Linux on the Cobalt Qube 3
Use the Intel or Athlon architecture desktop machine for this step. The desktop machine must be capable of booting the Red Hat Linux installation CD-ROM, and installing and running Red Hat Linux. The machine must also be able to boot itself from a standard IDE drive chain, such as the one used in the Qube 3 appliance.
Since today's desktop machines are most likely an i686 class machine or higher, this complicates the setup slightly. Essentially, the i386 version of the glibc libraries will have to be forced in a later step, replacing the i686 class libraries installed by Red Hat's setup program. That will be explained more in the next section.
On the desktop machine, if the hardware is available, create a CD-R or other removable media copy containing the files that will be required after Red Hat Linux is installed. If the hardware is not available, then keeping the desktop machine's hard drive installed to access its files later may be a convenient if slightly more risky alternative. Or, these files may be fetched across a network, though some manual configuration of the Qube's ethernet interfaces will be necessary.
In the desktop machine, remove or make existing hard drives into secondary drives. If the required kernel and related files are also available on a CD-R or other removable media, removing the existing drives may impose less risk of accidental data loss. Otherwise, take care to understand which drive is which, both physically and in the logical terms of their master/slave roles on the IDE controllers. These settings vary from one model of hard drove to another.
Specify in the desktop machine's BIOS to allow for booting from media in the CD-ROM drive. These settings vary from one desktop machine to another.
Warning! All data on the Qube 3 hard drive will be erased. Do not proceed if there is critical information on the drive.
Do not try to boot the desktop machine with the old Cobalt Qube 3 software load. The contents of the drive will be replaced during the upcoming Red Hat Linux installation.
Not every detail of the installation is discussed in this document. Only those steps which are important to the process of installing Red Hat Linux for use in the Cobalt Qube 3 appliance will be mentioned.
ext2: To use the experimental Cobalt kernel as-is, which supports ext2 but not ext3, then be careful to format each data partition with the ext2 format, and not the Red Hat Linux 7.2 default of ext3.
ext3: To use the experimental Cobalt kernel, rebuilt to support ext3 journalling, then select the ext3 format for each data partition on the hard drive. The data will still be accessible if mounted as ext2 by the proms or during emergencies, but will be further protected by the kernel's use of journalling in the everyday operation of the appliance.
Warning! If the desktop machine has any additional drives still installed, take care to avoid partitioning or deleting anything from those devices. Edit only the partition table for the device transplanted from the Qube 3 appliance. Note the Red Hat installer may decide to reformat any swap partitions on those additional drives, however, which is generally harmless.
One partition scheme which worked well on a Qube 3's 30GB hard drive is listed below. The swap file size chosen should be twice the size of the maximum memory expected on the appliance; this example Qube had 384MB of memory installed.
5120MB / ext3 format /dev/hda1 768MB swap swap format /dev/hda2 2048MB /var ext3 format /dev/hda3 (rest) /home ext3 format /dev/hda5 [in extended partition of /dev/hda4]This guide does not cover the various issues involved with making a separate /boot partition. It is possible to compile a kernel that assumes the / partition is not the first device. It is also possible to configure the Cobalt Qube 3 prom to locate a kernel on a specific drive partition. Since the ext3 partition format is identical to the ext2 format required by the proms when mounted read-only, and since it is fairly well failure-tested on many architectures by this point, this guide recommends combining the /boot and / partitions on /dev/hda1, rather than creating a separate /boot partition common to many Intel architecture machines.
Save a step later by choosing to review individual packages, and adding the mgetty package during installation. Since this package is available on the installation CD-ROM, this can be done later if desired, and individual package auditing is not necessary.
Instead, the next section will walk through some additional configuration necessary for the Cobalt Qube 3 architecture, performed through the Red Hat Linux Installation CD's rescue mode.
