Efika 5200B Project
Capek Robotin category Robotics
proposed by knickels on 26th April 2007 (accepted on 27th April 2006)
posted by knickels on 13th July 2007
Well, QNX on the EFIKA is definitely a beta product. I finally got a firmware update to enable this, and unexpectedly Linux quit booting. Hmm, turns out that the firmware abstraction layers used by the two kernel are different. Oh, well, bye-bye linux.
Anyway once I got the bplan patches integrated into my boot file, I got the EFIKA booting from QNX just fine. Then I started to descend into driver hell [:)/2] Turns out that the firmware doesn't like my Toshiba HD (see old blog postings) and the QNX driver doesn't like my other HD!! So I can either boot OR run QNX off a HD. Whew.
So anyway, I format the Toshiba to be one partition DOS and one partition QNX4 (for some reason QNX always thinks my EXT2 FSs are corrupt...), plug it into my Linux host, tar up the PPC QNX binaries to the DOS FS, move the HD back to the EFIKA, boot into QNX, untar the binaries to the QNX4 partition, and have a reasonably functional QNX system, finally! Reminds me of the early (92 or so) days of Linux installs. Remember collecting packages from various ftp and gopher sites?
So I have the hard drive working ok, I have USB working well, next fight is with the ethernet driver. DHCP didn't "just work". I'll probably try to figure out a manual routing table to try, just to see if the driver is working, on Monday. Also might go get another video card so I can see Photon on this beast - my student took my other Radeon to play with Debian on the second EFIKA during summer break.
Once I have a network, I expect things will start rolling quicker.