Okay, ArchLinux running on my Iomega HMNHDCD.
It was a lot of work, mostly trial & error - not because big obstacles, but small edges everywhere. I'll sum up a few of them.
The board init with serial attached is flakey. My board boots approximately one out of five times with my CA-42 attached. The other four times it hangs silently. It helps to power on with serial detached, then quickly connecting it. You don't have to wait until stage1 has booted. Just a moment after poweron, even before the disk has completely spun up, is enough. That way you get the complete output. I wish I would have found out this earlier...
The arch oxnas kernels don't work for me. The pci-kernel hangs immediately after "booting the kernel". The nopci-kernel hangs later in the boot process looking for some NAND stuff that probably isn't there on hmnhdce:
http://pastebin.com/nvZZ53hC. So I'm using the iomega-2.6.31.14 kernel. I saved the modules tree from the original rootfs and copied that into arch. Some modules seem missing - oxnas-led beeing the first one I noticed. Nothing important though, it works fine as far as I can see.
The network chip needs a complete up-down-cycle before picking up links properly. The standard arch network init did never bring the connection up while booting. Yet it was enough to simply "rc.d restart network" on serial connection to make it work. I had this in my rc.local at first. By comparing the boot logs I found out that lines 265 and 266 from the stock firmware boot
http://pastebin.com/6G3JypMe were missing in archs boot. I narrowed it down to simply:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '--- a/rc.d/set-oxnas-mac
+++ b/rc.d/set-oxnas-mac
@@ -6,19 +6,20 @@ case "$1" in
start)
stat_busy 'Setting MAC address'
#clear LED blinker
modprobe oxnas-led
proled amber
# if not run, will default to '00:31:0e:00:00:01'
MAC_ADDR=`cat /usr/local/mac_addr`
ifconfig eth0 down
if ifconfig eth0 hw ether $MAC_ADDR
then
proled green
ifconfig eth0 up
+ ifconfig eth0 down
stat_done
- ifconfig eth0 up
+ #ifconfig eth0 up
else') As this is oxnas specific, I think that script is a good place for this. That way nothing has to be changed in arch's network stuff. Maybe you want to add it to the images. It can't hurt and I read about network problems of other users.
That's it. I'm still fighting with samba to make it work as PDC. But that is not arch specific. Now I also know a lot of things I didn't want to know. The usual linux story... It's always the same.
But without your work I wouldn't be there at all - thank you, WHSE!
Ciao,
solo