Upgrading m68k from etch-m68k to unstable

After being dropped out of Debian, the m68k was stalled from some time now. There was no real upgrade path and so my machines still are running etch-m68k. Thanks to Thorsten Glaser the port is slowly keeping up with NPTL now ported to kernel and glibc for m68k. He took care to port and compile a lots of packages that are needed for upgrading from etch-m68k. Big thanks for that to Thorsten!

Anyway, I’m in the progress of upgrading my m68k machines and buildds with the help and tips from Thorsten and this is the way I’m doing this:

Change your /etc/apt/sources.list to include this:

deb http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/ unstable main contrib
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian etch-m68k main contrib non-free
Get libuuid-perl from snapshot.debian.org:

wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20070128T000000Z/pool/main/libu/libuuid-perl/libuuid-perl_0.02-1_m68k.deb
dpkg -i libuuid-perl_0.02-1_m68k.deb
Get kernel & linux-base from unstable
You need to install a recent kernel like linux-image-2.6.39-2-amiga in my case. Either download it by hand or use apt:

apt-get -d install linux-image-2.6.39-2-amiga linux-base
cd /var/cache/apt/archive
dpkg –force-depends -i linux-image-2.6.39-2-amiga_2.6.39-3_m68k.deb linux-base_3.3_all.deb
If needed, remove linux-bases postinst, when you get this kind of error:

syntax error at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-base.postinst line 1275, near "# UUIDs under /dev"
Can’t use global $_ in "my" at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-base.postinst line 1289, near "{$_"
rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-base.postinst
dpkg –configure –pending –force-depends
If everything installed fine you should be ready to boot into your new kernel.
On Amigas you mostly likely need to edit your boot script and copy your kernel and System.map to your AmigaOS partition. This is how my boot looks like:

amiboot-5.6 -k vmlinux-2.6.39 "debug=mem root=/dev/sda4 video=pal-lace devtmpfs.mount=1"

You can omit the debug=mem. This is just for the case that the kernel crashes. You can then collect the dmesg output under AmigaOS with the dmesg tool. The other parameter devtmpfs.mount=1 is needed because we don’t want udev. Using video=pal-lace is necessary because the 2.6.39 kernel crashes on initializing my PicassoII graphics card and I’ve unplugged the card for the time being necessary to solve the problem.
Kernel 2.6.39 runs fine, but you can’t ssh into machine.
Because we don’t want udevd, there’s now a problem when trying to login by SSH:

pty allocation request failed on channel 0
stdin is not a tty

You can fix this either by installing udev, which most websites recommend when you’re looking for this error, because on Xen this is the recommended solution, but as we are on m68k and not under Xen, it’s better to run with a static /dev. So you need to create /dev/pts and add the following to your /etc/fstab:

mkdir /dev/pts
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
After kernel boots into 2.6.39 you can dist-upgrade to unstable.
When you successfully booted into your new kernel, you should be save to proceed with upgrading to unstable. For that you should first let the missing or broken depends from linux-image and linux-base being installed:

apt-get -f install

This should lead to install some dependencies that were missing, because using dpkg –force-depends from above. After that I upgraded dpkg, apt and apt-utils:

apt-get install dpkg apt apt-utils

When this succeeded, you should be save to fully dist-upgrade to unstable:

apt-get -u dist-upgrade

When you get errors during apt-get dist-upgrade, you might run dpkg –configure –pending or apt-get -f install, before proceeding with apt-get -u dist-upgrade. Another problem can occur with apt. When you see this error:

E: Could not perform immediate configuration on ‘perl-modules’. Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2)

you should add "-o APT::Immediate-Configure=false" to your apt-get command, for example:

apt-get -o APT::Immediate-Configure=false -f install

Another pitfall might be exim4-daemon-heavy, which currently segfaults. Replace it by exim4-daemon-light in that case, which works.

As stated above, my PicassoII in my A3000 doesn’t seem to work under 2.6.39, whereas the PicassoIV in my A4000T does not crash the kernel.

Please don’t hesitate to add additions, corrections or other kind of feedback by commenting below!

P.S.:
Wouter and Thorsten are currently at Debconf in Banja Luka, working on the m68k port. Wouter just finished a first version of a new debian-installer image. He asks for testing it on real hardware. Please volunteer if you can! It’s available at: http://people.debian.org/~wouter/di-m68k/