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Linux on the Sager 9860

post #1 of 159
11/17/04 at 3:18pm
Thread Starter 
Hello all:
Sager has just come out with their first PCI-E machine, a monster, the 9860. Anyone try getting linux running on this?

Alex
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post #2 of 159
11/19/04 at 9:22pm
I'm getting mine Wednesday 11/24/2004. I'll be installing Gentoo on it with Hyperthreading enabled. I'll report my success and post my .config.
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post #3 of 159
11/19/04 at 10:51pm
Sweet I think there may be a new sticky in our future. I might be looking at the new Sagers next summer.
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post #4 of 159
11/20/04 at 11:39pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bsmith
Sweet I think there may be a new sticky in our future. I might be looking at the new Sagers next summer.

Yea Im also interested in this, I will be ordering the AW version sometime it looks like and am curious to see how it does.(Unless AW comes out with a pretty comparable AMD64, then Ill go with that in a heartbeat

Seablade
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post #5 of 159
11/22/04 at 11:21am
I just read today that CMP for the P4 has been labeled cmp-legacy.

I really wanted a PCIe AMD laptop but I just got tired of waiting. I'm getting this laptop at my company anyhow. I'll get a personal Athlon64 laptop later.

Anyhow I'm about to setup a chroot on my other P4 sitting here at the office and build my system from scratch over the next couple of days so I can just dump it over when I get the laptop. Here's some of the stuff I'll be using:

Gentoo Linux
2.6 Linux Kernel (with my personal patchiness)
NPTL
udev
#GCC 3.4.3 (My GCC 3.4 bootstrap failed miserably. I'll do it again in a chroot when i get the laptop since it will probably be more than twice as fast.)
Reiser4
Gnome 2.8
vsftpd
gaim, firefox, thunderbird, abiword, gnumeric, gimp, samba, k3b, flash, cups.
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post #6 of 159
11/22/04 at 1:08pm
Thread Starter 
Can someone try Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora 3?

Thanks
Alex
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post #7 of 159
11/29/04 at 3:19pm
I've spent little time on this due to dire mportant things (World of Warcraft). So I am just now attempting the install. My overnight builds were failing on my secondary machine so I was going to have to build from scratch on the laptop anyhow.

It looks like the PDC20378 won't work with libata yet. So I'm going to have to test out using the old SATA support.
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post #8 of 159
11/29/04 at 4:32pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ledskof
I've spent little time on this due to dire mportant things (World of Warcraft). So I am just now attempting the install. My overnight builds were failing on my secondary machine so I was going to have to build from scratch on the laptop anyhow.

It looks like the PDC20378 won't work with libata yet. So I'm going to have to test out using the old SATA support.
Just for my own sanity, is that the raid controller or just the SATA controller(Which would probably be worse?

Seablade
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post #9 of 159
11/30/04 at 4:52pm
The PDC20378 is a RAID controller . It has both SATA and ATA ports on it. You can put it into ATA mode so it doesn't offer RAID. The problem is, libata will only show the SATA ports and not the ATA ports. So I can't recognize my ATA hard drive.

I've made a livecd that boots on my laptop. The kernel I configured wouldn't load the hard drive. I'm going to try the promise drivers from their website now and see what happens.
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post #10 of 159
11/30/04 at 8:30pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ledskof
The PDC20378 is a RAID controller .
Heh well you almost lucked out there

Yea keep me informed on that I am very curious, with how widespread I think their controllers are I would find it hard to believe that their isnt a linux driver out for them.

Seablade
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post #11 of 159
12/2/04 at 12:47pm
Yeah, there's a linux driver alright... except you need either Redhat 9, mandrake 7, or something equally as old to use them. They give partial binary drivers that don't compile, and don't even dream about kernel 2.6. I completely gave up on their RAID controller in my 8890, shut it off. Even then, I had to use their stupid controller, but luckily, the plain IDE controller had drivers for kernel 2.6. What really pissed me off was that through various emails I recieved from them, they kept on saying they were going to release new drivers, or open-source them "this summer". Summer came and went. I emailed again- they said "september". It's December- their drivers haven't changed since this time last year. Good luck with your promise drivers, but don't keep your hopes up! =p
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post #12 of 159
12/2/04 at 11:01pm
I'll be receiving my 9860 next week and i'm going to try a dual-boot with mandrake 10.0 and RAID0. I'll be using two ata7200 drives. I've heard there might be some problems so i'm expecting the worst. Any suggestions to make the installation easier?

ledskof, keep us posted on your progress. If you get it working maybe i'll consider switching to Gentoo.
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post #13 of 159
12/6/04 at 6:26pm
Brick, presently PATA (the old ATA) isn't supported in 2.6 kernel. Promise's drivers definitely don't work and I'm sure they'd be crap anyhow. In other words, forget about Promise supporting opensource.

There was a patch for libata for 2.6.9 but right after it finds my hard drive the system freezes.

good news is:
http://lwn.net/Articles/113868/
There's another libata patch soon that will support it. I don't have time to mess with this at all right now or I'd build the patches from bitkeeper and play around with it. It's gonna be a really busy week for me. I'll try to make time whenever they release the full patch (probably this week).
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post #14 of 159
12/8/04 at 10:40am
I got tired of waiting and tried the new libata driver from bitkeeper.
It does the same thing as the last one; my laptop freezes right after it finds the hard drive:
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0XF882E200 ctl 0xF882E238 bmdma 0x0 irq11
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0XF882E200 ctl 0xF882E238 bmdma 0x0 irq11
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0XF882E200 ctl 0xF882E238 bmdma 0x0 irq11
ata1: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
scsi0 : sata_promise
ata2: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
scsi1 : sata_promise
ata3: dev0 ATA, max UDMA/100, 117210240 sectors: lba48
(frozen)

--- edit ---

There might be some hope yet. I passed acpi=off and the boot actually gets passed the point it did before, and I'm getting a kernel panic now. I should be able to work that out though.

--- edit ---
I've got the system booting and recognizing the hard drive now.
I'm going to attempt to build the system now (right after I backup my other stuff).
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post #15 of 159
12/8/04 at 1:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ledskof
I got tired of waiting and tried the new libata driver from bitkeeper.
It does the same thing as the last one; my laptop freezes right after it finds the hard drive:
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0XF882E200 ctl 0xF882E238 bmdma 0x0 irq11
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0XF882E200 ctl 0xF882E238 bmdma 0x0 irq11
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0XF882E200 ctl 0xF882E238 bmdma 0x0 irq11
ata1: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
scsi0 : sata_promise
ata2: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
scsi1 : sata_promise
ata3: dev0 ATA, max UDMA/100, 117210240 sectors: lba48
(frozen)

--- edit ---

There might be some hope yet. I passed acpi=off and the boot actually gets passed the point it did before, and I'm getting a kernel panic now. I should be able to work that out though.

--- edit ---
I've got the system booting and recognizing the hard drive now.
I'm going to attempt to build the system now (right after I backup my other stuff).
Crud not another sick ACPI bios...

Tell me how it works and if you get the ACPI running under it, as that is kinda requirement

Seablade
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post #16 of 159
12/8/04 at 2:16pm
sorry I forgot to mention this. I rebuilt the livecd and reconfigured the kernel from scratch with ACPI in it and everything. The system boots fine with ACPI enabled.

So it looks like ACPI is working fine.

--- edit ---

It's installing fine right now. I won't be able to finish it today though so, I'm going to work on it some more tomorrow.
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post #17 of 159
12/8/04 at 11:07pm
Thanks for the update.
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post #18 of 159
12/9/04 at 12:50am
Quote:
Originally Posted by ledskof
sorry I forgot to mention this. I rebuilt the livecd and reconfigured the kernel from scratch with ACPI in it and everything. The system boots fine with ACPI enabled.

So it looks like ACPI is working fine.

--- edit ---

It's installing fine right now. I won't be able to finish it today though so, I'm going to work on it some more tomorrow.
Woohoo awesome, so so far it looks like RAID wont be availiable on the laptop then but have you noticed anything else not running correctly?

Seablade
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post #19 of 159
12/9/04 at 3:45pm
My current issue is that with SMP turned on in the kernel, it won't boot.
So I might have to finish building it without hyperthreading and try and get back to making that work later.

My system stuff is built I just need to finish up with X/Gnome/etc.
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post #20 of 159
12/9/04 at 4:43pm
Well I'm getting "don't know how to set addresses for family" from ifconfig now.

So something is really screwed somewhere. I even used the same kernel that I was able to boot and build the system from... Its a software issue somewhere.

I'm going to bootstrap the system again, so I'm basically set back another day.

At least I can actually boot off the hard drive and do all of this stuff now instead of using a LiveCD.

BTW for anyone worrying, you won't have to go through as much trouble as I've gone through if you just get a SATA hard drive. And future linux livecds shouldn't have this much trouble for either PATA or SATA.
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