5. A first check

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Before we let you perform each and every of the following steps, you should make sure that Linux can actually run on your Amiga. To check that out, do the following (this will not write to any of your partitions, so this will not destroy any data) :

make a working directory on any partition that has at least 3 MB free disk space
copy the amiboot-<x.y>.gz, new-filesys.gz and vmlinux-<x.y>.gz to this directory (replace the x.y letters with the version numbers your files actually have).

unpack these files:



gzip -d amiboot-<x.y>.gz
gzip -d new-filesys.gz
gzip -d vmlinux-<version>.gz

Now turn off any external devices (CD-ROM, tape drive, scanner etc.) to keep the reasons for problems as few as possible. If you use networking boards (Arcnet, Ethernet or alike), reboot the Amiga and try to stop the boot process as early as possible (if possible, use the Boot without startup-sequence feature of the boot menu).
Go to the directory with the above mentioned files
start the kernel with the following command line:



   amiboot-<x.y> -d -k vmlinux-<version> -r new-filesys video=pal,inverse

If you are using an Amiga 4000 and your monitor cannot display video modes with a line frequency of 15 kHz, you might want to use another mode like e.g. video=pal-lace,inverse The bootstrap program now prints your system configuration and waits for you to hit a key. Do so. Your screen should go black, and after a few more seconds you should see the kernel start. It will print out a couple of messages, what hardware it detected, and will finally await commands at its shell prompt:

If everything worked ok, you can go for the real installation. Right now, you can directly reboot using the Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga key sequence, but keep in mind already now that this should NEVER be done once you have mounted partitions or started the kernel from a harddisk partition!

If the boot process does not work for some reason and you tried everything you could think of, either your system is not suited for Linux, or you have some other problem we do not (yet) know about. Write down the entire output you got (on both the Amiga side and on the Linux side (if there was any output, that is)) and ask someone who might be able to help you - a good starting point is one of the Linux/m68k related newsgroups, like maus.os.linux68k, comp.unix.amiga or (coming December '95) comp.os.linux.m68k.

When you prepare a posting asking for help, please do not forget to give the following information:

What Amiga: Model, CPU, RAM, FPU, MMU, SCSI/IDE, other hardware extensions
What amiboot/kernel version
the output of amiboot
the output of the kernel - if there was any
where exactly the boot process crashed/stopped

If you do not get any answer there, you might try asking me (Frank; E-Mail address is at the top of this document).

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