Pegasos II - Hawk's Report

Old Amiga user discovers Pegasos on the net. After some months and the appearance of Pegasos II, he decides to buy it... Well, here's the story:

The Story

I ordered the pegasos 2 weeks ago. I was reticent because the shipping expenses were a bit high... Anyway, I didn't know the motherboards were delayed or something, since I didn't read any announcement in pegasos.com or received any notification. But it seems that finally the motherboards were shippped on December 23rd.

December 29th

My mobile phone wakes me up. I didn't hear the UPS guy ring the bell at the door... ^^; (I spent last night programming the MorphOS clock applet...) It's monday morning in Kawaguchi, Japan. I receive my Saint David's present: my Pegasos II motherboard!

White box and SuperBundle. The cover of SuperBundle is somewhat weird (超兄貴って感じ･･･　^^;). No Debian Linux! They say is under testing... But in the Super Bundle there's the CD of PegXLin.

I took it to my laboratory in Tokyo and read the manuals on the way. I'll wait 'till next day to buy the hardware. Hiroshi will help me to choose ;)

December 30th

Hiroshi was waiting for me at Akihabara. I wanted a small case, but we were not sure if it would fit in one of those mini ITX boxes. So finally we bought a slim tower, Minuet, very beatiful piano-like black and silver front. Kindda heavy (around 5.5 Kg), but small. That means I had to buy a low-profile video card. I bought a second hand Radeon 7500, that comes with a small size plate to change the card to low-profile. Then, we bought 512 MB PC2100 memory, a 120GB harddisk and the harddisk cable.

Back to the laboratory. After eating some onigiri we started assembling everything. Discharge your body, and insert the CPU card and the memory on the motherboard. Then replace the tower's back plate with holes for motherboard ports with the one provided with Pegasos II. The holes of this tower are already high, so no brass support for the motherboard seems to be needed. Just in case, we put some tape between the hole and the motherboard.

The tower space for devices is very practical, since you can inclinate it or take it out. So all the connections become very easy. However, there's something wrong with the tower: no reset button!

Everything is ready. I took an old CDROM drive from the lab for the installation. Turn on the computer. The SmartFirmware BIOS screen appears! I can not open the CD Drive... We forgot to power it... ^^; Now it works, but regarding the english manual, it should boot with the command boot cd, but it doesn't work. It complains about missing bsd or something. The CDROM seems to get stucked sometimes. So we replaced the old IDE cable for an ATA100 one. Still doesn't boot. Looking the german manual, I tried typing boot /pci/ide/cdrom boot.img. This time it works.

From MorphOS I partition the disk. Just two partitions as suggested in the manual, 256MB and 4GB (is there any limit in the size of partitions? With SFS is ok?). When formatting the second partition, it gets stucked. Maybe it was because I was opening a new shell? Well, just in case, reboot and try again. This time it works.

And now install the system into the harddisk. I received an e-mail warning me that the md5sum was wrong and a script that just copies all the CD to Ram Disk, unmounts the CD and reassigns its label to Ram Disk, and empties the md5sum. Now you can execute the installation script. Now I can boot from Hard Disk.

The resolutions provided for this Raddeon are kindda low, even if I change my monitor to a default 86Khz monitor. So I had to edit my own resolution. No much problem. Then I tried to install the Super Bundle, but no Installer is provided. I had to download it from the Internet. I plug in a 100 MBit Ethernet cable (I'd like to try GigBit!). But where's AmiTCP? In Pegasos home page they say it comes with the system... So now what? I use my laptop to download from Aminet the demo version of AmiTCP 4 and Miami Deluxe 1.0c. Copied to my USB memory, but the memory is not recognized by MorphOS [Error massstorage.class Couldn't find/load filesystem for usbscsi.device unit 0 as UMSD:]. So I burned the files to a CD. The Miami Deluxe complains about requiring MUI 3.8 (MorphOS comes with 3.9!), but I guess that the problem is that it requires the normal version to install over it. I then try AmiTCP, but of course it does not come with net drivers for the Ethernet in the Pegasos II ... ^^;

I update the BIOS as I was told to do by another e-mail. I set up the autoboot. I didn't define any alias for the partitions. Instead, I just use hd:0.

Well, after copying the Installer to c:, I could install the Super Bundle. After killing some birdies, I went back home in the last night train. I started writing this on the train.

Installation HowTo: Hardware

• [CASE] Pegasos II is a microATX motherboard, so any microATX compliant case should do the job. However, there may be some minor "complications". In the case of my Minuet case, the cables of the front audio connectors are too short and they don't reach the internal audio connections of Pegasos II motherboard. It has also 2 USB front connectors, but all the cables come in a 5x2 block connector. Pegasos II motherboard has just one internal USB motherboard, so I should divide the block in two 5x1 rows, but the cutter didn't work (^^;).

  I am also wondering if the motherboard would fit somewhere else, like in one of those boxes design for miniITX motherboards (barebones usually come with that), o the case of a PS2 or a PSX ;) The size of the board is merely a PS2 or B5 paper.

• [CPU fan] I am using my G3@600 Mhz without CPU fan, just the heat sink. Cool computing! Actually, I wanted to build a silent fanless system, so I may install one of those PCI-card-like power supply in the future.

• [Graphics Card] Just in case, better to buy an AGP graphics card appearing in the compatibility list in Pegasos II manual. In my case, I wanted a low profile card, since the Minuet case is too slim for regular cards, so I bought a Radeon 7500, which can be converted into low profile easily. Unfortunately, this card has a small fan! (... my dream of fanless system... (;_;))

  So, I decided to get rid of the fan in the graphics card. First, I bought a silver-color 3,5 inch frontal thermal monitor (blue backlight :). Then, I tried installing a nice heat sink (ZM-NB32J). With the fan, the temperature is around 33C, while just stopping it makes the chip quickly go up to 55C! I stopped the system at that point, so it may get even worse... With the bigger heat sink, the temperature increases very slowly, but it can arrive 'til 50C. By the way, the CPU itself goes up to 66C.

• [IDE cables] Remember using ATA100 cables! I recommend using Smart/Slim Cables, just for commodity and "security". By security I mean that the others may be "easily" torn off. The Minuet case has a ramp for easy installing the disks, but my IDE cable got trapped in the trail and I torn it off (;_;)... I bought a Slim Cable then...
• [CASE fan] I decided that it was too hot inside the case ^^; So I installed a case fan Cool Jag. At 12V, it runs at 2000 RPM, and the noise it's 20 dB. I plan to change it to 5V (when I buy the adapter...). At 5V, it should be around 750 RPM. Here is a table of temperatures:

  	Case open	Case closed, no fan	Case closed, 2000 RPM	Case closed, 750 RPM
  CPU, normal usage (~15%)	40C	58C	33C	?
  CPU, compiling (~100%)	55C	71C	43C	?
  Radeon (no fan)	30C	49C	29C	?

Installation HowTo: Software

• [boot] From the BIOS, when you insert the MorphOS CD, if [boot cd] doesn't work, type:

  boot /pci/ide/cdrom boot.img
  

• [MorphOS] The MorphOS v1.4 CD shipped with Pegasos II came with a bad md5 checksum. It was reported promptly, and we were sent this script. Open a shell and type:

  copy morphosboot:#? t: clone all
  assign morphosboot: dismount
  assign morphosboot: t:
  echo >t:md5sums
  cd t:
  execute t:hdinstall
  

• [Shell] NewShell is the command line interpreter. If you are not familiar with the amiga shell, I explain it a bit. morphosboot is the label of the MorphOS CD. You can access devices by the device name or its label. The device name of the CD is cd0, so the first line can be replaced by copy cd0:#? t: clone all. However, the label is a safer way, since it's the abstract and unique name. If you had another CD-Rom unit, the CD may be inserted in cd1:, but the label will be the same, of course!

  An interesting device is RAM:, labelled Ram Disk:. You can access ALL your system memory through the file system :D

  The wildcard is #?, and not *.

  The assign command works similar to mount in unix. In the script above, T: is a label assigned to a directory in the Ram Disk, RAM:T. That directory is used to store temporary files. So, we copy all the CD into RAM, then umount the CD, with the command assign (label:) dismount, and reassign the label to the directory in RAM. Then, all the installation scripts using the morphosboot label will be fooled and they will use the copy we made in Ram.

  execute executes a batch script file.

• [Flash Update] Before you modify anything in the Smart Firmware (with the SETENV command), update it or your system may become unusable!

  The last flash update removes the 256M limitation on Linux.

• [Screen Mode] With the System Preferences you can change the resolution of the Ambient desktop or any other available screens in the system. But even when I selected a different monitor, all the resolutions I got were from a 31Khz monitor, so not very impressive. But you can edit your own new resolutions easily. Try adding some new resolutions, starting first with predefined presets. Try increasing the pixel clock to get higher frequency. If you get a blank screen when testing your resolution, press ESC to go back to the configuration window.

• [TCP/IP stack] Although in pegasosppc.com they say that MorphOS comes with AmiTCP, it's not true so far. Maybe with the next release of MorphOS. You should download one of the TCP/IP stacks available for the Amiga, such as AmiTCP, Miami or Genesi. There are not PowerPC versions available so far, although of course the ethernet device driver that comes with MorphOS runs natively in PPC. I decided to install Miami Deluxe 1.0c. If you are familiar with Unix and network configurations, it's pretty straight-forward and convenient, since all the configuration is centralized in one graphical interface.

• [Browser] MorphOS comes with Voyager PPC, which looks very fast, but I couldn't actually try it since the proxy settings are not working. I need to navigate via a proxy, but it seems that in this version, 3.3.4 PPC, the proxy does not work at all. So, I downloaded IBrowse 2.3 (with its correspondent new icon ;), which is not PPC but it runs very fast in MorphOS (thanks to the JIT emulation). I bought IBrowse 2 some years ago, so I copied my old keyfile and it works perfectly. Now life begins! We can download software directly from the Pegasos :D

• [Installer] You better go to Aminet and download the Installer v.43.3 application, since most of the Amiga/MorphOS software, including the SuperBundle, uses it. Again, it's not PPC, but who cares? ;P

  *Notes:

  • When you install something, I recommend you select Expert Mode, so you can check, for instance, MUI library versions and stuff.
  • Sometimes some applications refuse to install because of the Operating System version or something like that. You can edit the installer file and change the number of minimum version to 0, for instance.
  • When installing MUI classes and libraries, sometimes you are requested with MUI: mount point. You can just add permanently to your s:user-startup this line:

    	assign MUI: SYS:MorphOS
    	

• [FAT95] If you want to read Windows FAT filesystems, download from aminet fat95. Actually, you just need one file:

  copy PROGRAM_DIR/L/fat95 L:fat95
  

• [USB] MorphOS comes with a very nice USB stack, Poseidon. But even after installing the FAT95 filesystem, my USB memory stick didn't work. I installed Poseidon v2.2 (MorphOS 1.4 comes with Poseidon v2.1), and now it works perfectly :D

• [Media players] To listen to MP3, you can use Kaya included with MorphOS. For playing mpeg videos, I downloaded mplayer v0.91. I am not sure if it's the same mplayer available for Linux, BeOS, Mac OS X... since it has no GUI and it does not appear in the mplayer official web page, but it plays videos very fast ;) Use the mouse wheel for positioning in the stream (fast forward/rewind).

• [Instant Messaging] I installed JabberWocky, which uses jabber protocol. Version 1.0 is available for MorphOS, but I decided to install AmigaOS version 1.4. I installed the required MUI libraries, but I still couldn't open incoming messages. I had to download also MCC_MailText, also available from Aminet.

  To use Jabber you first have to register in one of its public servers. A list is available in jabber.org. Everything is explained in the documentation. Type nick@server and a password (in my case I couldn't see what I was typing at all ???), and register. Then from the menu open "Agents" window. If the server you selected supports Transport protocols such as MSN or ICQ, they should appear in that window. If you want to use your MSN account, click on the MSN Transport, then Register, and type your full nick, such as my_nick@hotmail.com, your password and your nick. Register and Subscribe. If you had already a list of contacts, it should be populated in a moment. You may have to change the nick names manually, though.

• [Mail] Definetely, you have to install YAM. It's one of the best mailer applications I have seen in any platform. Opera's Mailer is a bit similar. YAM v2.4 is available for MorphOS. Download yam24.lha and yam24mos.lha in the same directory and uncompress both files. Click in the installer. YAM will also install a bunch of MUI Classes that you may need for other programs (like JabberWocky).

• [Keymap] I have a japanese keyboard with no Windows keys. No Windows keys means no Amiga keys, so you can not do copy-paste (Amiga+C, Amiga+V) or reset (Ctrl+Both Amiga keys)! Well, I changed my keyboard... However, there's no japanese keymap anyway. I downloaded from Aminet KME editor (the other didn't seem to work) and edited a new keymap. You can download it here. Copy it to SYS:MorphOS/Devs/Keymaps. It's not finished yet, since the japanese keyboard has more keys, but KME doesn't seem to recognize them.

• [Japanese fonts/input] I installed JKFF, but it requires the FixFonts program. Copy it from an AmigaOS...

• [SYS Utils] MorphOS comes with a bunch of different system utilities to control the behaviour of your system. Most of them, like USB, Screens and stuff can be controlled from the System Settings. There's a Task Manager inside Utilities, but it seems that tasks can not be killed... any idea?

  A useful program is SnoopDos. Look for it in Aminet. Sometimes applications refuse to load or they don't behave properly. With SnoopDOS you can monitor the libraries that the application is trying to open, which files, etc. It is very convenient!

I managed installing Gentoo Linux, and I can run MacOnLinux on there :D Actually, Gentoo is the system I am currently using. I recommend it! It's a bit slower than MorphOS, but you can get the fast IBM Java VM 1.4.1 for PPC, Firefox, MOL, and a lot of drivers ;)

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