11th April 2000
No, I'm not dead - just very busy. I've been doing a lot of accademic work recently, and also a lot of real work too. However, I am going to complete this port at some point. I will have some free time in the summer of 2000, and I will probably tinker a bit more with the BeBox then - probably starting again with a fresh port of kernel 2.4, and also possibly looking to re-use some of the work that the NetBSD porting team have done. Sorry for the delay ...
29th May 1999
The two questions I'm getting asked most frequently at the moment are "Why isn't this project moving forwards?" and "Can I please have a copy of your source?". The answer to the first question is simple; "I'm in the middle of my exams at Cambridge". The answer to the second is a bit more complex. Basically, I store my development work on two machines, my BeBox and my server at home. Normally I'd be able to ssh to my server at home, gather my modifications to the sources, and post the on the web somewhere. But recently there was a power spike at home, and the PSU in my server appears to have gone up in smoke (although I've not been home to verify this). I will therefore have no access to my BeBox work until I return home in late June. I apologise for this delay.
8th March 1999
I've completed most of the initial work involved in porting Linux 2.2.1 to the BeBox; today I persuaded it to work with my ISA NE2000 clone and mounted a root filesystem over NFS from my Redhat-i386 Linux box. The filesystem was a LinuxPPC R4 installation that I cobbled together by rpm2cpio'ing and extracting a bunch of the LinuxPPC R4 rpms. It seems to be working very well; see my email to the mailing list on the status page. I'll put up a patch against the mainstream Linux 2.2.1 kernel when I've stabilised my work on it.
26th February 1999
Today I decided that I could probably write quite a large chunk of the code from here in Cambridge, without physical access to the BeBox. I therefore downloaded the latest binutils and egcs-1.1.1 and produced a cross compiler. I downloaded the current work I'd done on the bootstrap and the kernel from my Linux server at home over the internet, and set about recompiling it. Of course, huge amounts of stuff failed and I ended up spending a few hours chasing bugs and fixing tools that I used to generate the bootstrap. I compiled a bootstrap, built a floppy disk image, and emailed it to Andy and Sean. Both Sean and Andy confirmed that it booted ok (Sean is still having problems with TFTP transfers taking a long time, however). Anyway, I now have a working cross-compiler for my PPro here in Cambridge. I also downloaded Linux 2.2.2, and discovered that there were some evil bugs lurking in it on non-x86 architectures. So I downloaded Linux 2.2.1 instead and added a PowerPC machine type named "BeBox" which defines CONFIG_BEBOX. I also added a machine definition and told the DMA code about the system. Bits of the kernel now compile okay! However, the keyboard code seems to be quite broken (it wants us to have a Macintosh keyboard, I think). Anyway, I'll fix that tomorrow.
All in all, quite a good start to my effort to port 2.2 to the BeBox, and it's going a bit quicker than I thought it might. There's still a lot of work to do, however.
22nd February 1999
Updated the netboot tool on the tools page.
17th December 1998
Posted the bootstrap that boots over the network on the tools page.
16th December 1998
Posted a status update and a copy of my whats-going-on email to the status page.
12th August 1998
Yes, I'm still alive! Sorry there's not been much going on here recently, I've been very busy at school and at work, and on vacation. Work on this project will continue in the near future. Thanks for all the encouraging emails I've been receiving recently!
10th June 1998
Loads of changes to the Installation page. Partition map sharing with BeOS and the boot ROM is now supported.
7th June 1998
Major new chunk of information about the BeBox hardware on the tools page!
Fixed a few spelling errors.
1st June 1998
Work on porting the 2.1 kernel progresses. I am working on getting more video cards to work. There are several options, the best looks like snarfing the register contents from Linux/x86 (using appropriated XFree86 code) and then using that, combined with the table of PCI vendor/model IDs, to set up any VGA cards we find at boot. It might even work ;)
We urgently require any information that anyone has about the BeBox hardware and boot ROM. If you have any, please get in touch!.
16th May 1998
Updated the beboot_tools on the tools pages. Now supports non-linear, non-contiguous mapped writing of images. Hoorah and huzzah!
New site
I've recently reorganised this site. It's now separate from my personal pages, and it should be a lot simpler to find the information you're looking for.
Navigate the site using the image map on the left of each page.
News Flash!
Building BeBox kernels on your x86 box is now possible!
Locations of files to download and instructions for cross-compiling your own kernel are on the developer tools page.
Watch this space!
There's likely to be a lot of movement in the Linux for BeBox world in the next few weeks - check this site regularly to stay on top of it.
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© 2002 William R Sowerbutts <will@sowerbutts.com>
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Be is a registered trademark, and BeOS, BeBox, BeWare, GeekPort, the Be logo and the BeOS logo are trademarks of Be, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Yadda yadda yadda.