[9fans] Plan9 on a Compaq Armada M700

[9fans] Plan9 on a Compaq Armada M700

[Burton Samograd]

Good day all,

I sucessfully managed to install plan9 on my Compaq Armada M700 (PII
333, 128M) laptop yesterday and wanted to share a bit about what I
needed to get it to work.

The first thing to figure out were the video options.  I was having
some sort of timing problems with the video driver until i specified
1024x768x8 with the monitor being multisync65, which gives a good solid
display.

The major installation problem was that the system was constantly
running out of physical memory during the distmount phase.  After a
bunch of hunting and exploration, it looked like the kernel was only
reporting about 3k free pages of free physical memory, with about 16k
pages of swap (approx numbers).

I managed to get the plan9 partion 'preped' with a swap, so after
copying the swap utility from the plan9 boot image (9pccd.gz) to a
shared ext2 partition i was able to use it from the plan9 install image
(9pcflop.gz) and fire up the swap file so I could sucessfully perform
the install.

Everything went smoothly with the install after that and I'm now
booting plan9 from the harddrive using grub. :)

After this experience, I have a feeling that either there's a bug in my
comp's mainboard which causes problems with the physical memory
calculation or (since I don't know much about the kernel yet) it has a
hardcoded max somewhere that is limiting my available memory.  Any
comments on this problem or suggestions on how to fix it?

And finally, I would suggest to the iso maintainers that they put the
swap utility in the 9pcflop.gz image and some instructions in the
installation/installer to enable the swap file when it's created so
others don't have this kind of problem.

In any case I'm sure i'll be working on this problem since i would like
to use all my ram on my system and I need something to do anyways :)

I would also like to point out that I have a Xircom dual function
(eth,serial) pcmcia card (REM56G-100) which seems to be recognized by
the boot sequence but doesn't work.  I googled and found the driver
code (couldn't find it in the kernel source, but I'll try looking
harder) and will be trying to get that working asap.  Same thing with
my sound card (ESS ES1978), which is should be similar to the ESS
driver that I noticed is already in the kernel.

But yes, here is another partial successful plan9 install.  I hope to
be contributing to development soon. 

-- 
burton samograd
kruhft@gmail.com