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Will SH ever get a live cd?
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dragos240
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 1:12 am    Post subject: Will SH ever get a live cd? Reply with quote

I REALLY want to see if I can get gentoo to run on my dreamcast, even if it only boots off of the livecd. There's a stage3 archive, but not a cd. Anyone developing one?
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few
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 8:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I guess you are better off with asking on bugzilla.
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BradN
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 09, 2010 1:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There's two problems:

I don't think there's a standard bootable CD format for SH4 architecture (plus dreamcast needs its own format with an audio track in front and special bootloader)

And, the dreamcast's 16MB of main RAM isn't enough to run gentoo's init scripts (try mem=16M on your main computer once), so you would need a hack of sorts to mount swap before running the normal init. Since there's no suitable block device in the dreamcast (unless you build an IDE interface for the ext port), you would have to use network swap over a broadband adapter. Performance would be describable only with the aid of obscenities.

If you really want to run linux on dreamcast (I have, and it's at least amusing), find some of the old cd images floating around on the net.
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timeBandit
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 09, 2010 4:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.
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dragos240
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 09, 2010 3:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BradN wrote:
There's two problems:

I don't think there's a standard bootable CD format for SH4 architecture (plus dreamcast needs its own format with an audio track in front and special bootloader)

And, the dreamcast's 16MB of main RAM isn't enough to run gentoo's init scripts (try mem=16M on your main computer once), so you would need a hack of sorts to mount swap before running the normal init. Since there's no suitable block device in the dreamcast (unless you build an IDE interface for the ext port), you would have to use network swap over a broadband adapter. Performance would be describable only with the aid of obscenities.

If you really want to run linux on dreamcast (I have, and it's at least amusing), find some of the old cd images floating around on the net.


True! The disk format is not normal. The first sector of the disk is a 4 second raw audio clip. The second is data. 1st_read.bin and IP.bin needs to be present to boot. Both can be burned on linux. I got an old version of redhat running on my dreamcast. That tells you it's possible!
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roarinelk
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 09, 2010 7:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BradN wrote:
There's two problems:

I don't think there's a standard bootable CD format for SH4 architecture (plus dreamcast needs its own format with an audio track in front and special bootloader)


Correct. As SH-4 is like ARM more of an embedded architecture, a livecd wouldn't make sense. Better to just provide a stage3
for example so that anyone with SH4 hardware can quickly build a custom userland or use it as NFSroot.
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ddc
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 2:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dream cast has no sense: it's a toy, so no liveCD
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dragos240
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 10:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

roarinelk wrote:
BradN wrote:
There's two problems:

I don't think there's a standard bootable CD format for SH4 architecture (plus dreamcast needs its own format with an audio track in front and special bootloader)


Correct. As SH-4 is like ARM more of an embedded architecture, a livecd wouldn't make sense. Better to just provide a stage3
for example so that anyone with SH4 hardware can quickly build a custom userland or use it as NFSroot.


Well. I NEED something to boot from. There isn't a hard drive on the dreamcast, or at least I'm not aware of one.
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