If you dedicated the first partition of your first hard drive to a small FAT partition for booting, you can the modify the Boot Menu to have a selection to load MILO from this partition.
Add another boot selection, as described in the section called Setting up ARC for Installation for ARC and in the section called Setting up AlphaBIOS for Installation for AlphaBIOS. However, this time you should select the appropriate hard drive device. If you installed Linux to the first hard drive, the device should be:
scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) |
If you are using an ARC console or the AlphaBIOS console, select the following device:
Disk 0 Partition 1 |
If you wish to autoboot into Linux, set the OSLOADOPTIONS variable. In the ARC and AlphaBIOS consoles, the contents of the OSLOADOPTIONS parameter are passed to MILO as a command. In order to boot Linux automatically in MILO, enter a value for OSLOADOPTIONS similar to this one:
boot sda2:/boot/vmlinuz initrd=/boot/initrd.img root=/dev/sda2 |
Once you have done this, booting and running Linux on an Alpha system should be very similar to doing so on an x86 system.
Use of a configuration file, /etc/milo.conf, can streamline booting different kernels or passing different sets of arguments to the same kernel. It is analogous to the /etc/aboot.conf file read by aboot, but is in a very different format, much more along the lines of a LILO configuration file.
milo.conf(5) milo.conf(5) NAME /etc/milo.conf - MILO configuration file DESCRIPTION MILO reads this file when it is given a boot dev: command, where dev specifies the device and partition where /etc/milo.conf resides, e.g. sda2. milo.conf consists of keyword = value statements and may also contain empty lines and #-style comments. Value may be enclosed in double quotes, which are necessary if value contains space(s). The file is structurally sub-divided into a common part and several per-image parts. Each per-image part starts with an image statement. Common part is everything pre ceding the first image statement. COMMON PART KEYWORDS timeout = timeout Instruct MILO to boot the first image specified in /etc/milo.conf, giving the user timeout/10 seconds to interrupt. A zero value means the default behaviour (no time limit). command = MILO_command Execute MILO_command when /etc/milo.conf is read. A typical example may be command = "set MEMORY_SIZE 224" This statement is cumulative: several commands may be given, and their order will be preserved. PER-IMAGE KEYWORDS image = [dev:]file File is the Linux kernel image file name. If dev: is omitted, same device and partition are used as those for /etc/milo.conf. device = dev: An alternative way to specify the device where the kernel image resides. label = boot_label The name for this boot selection (case sensitive). root = root_device The name (in normal Linux notation, e.g. /dev/sda5) of the device where the root filesystem should be mounted. append = kernel_arguments Any remaining kernel arguments that you wish to be appended to the (implicit) boot command line. Note that you can, for example, put root=root_device into kernel_arguments instead of using the root statement. command = MILO_command A per-image version of the common-part command statement. It is also cumulative and the commands are executed just before booting the selected image. |
Here is an example /etc/milo.conf file, which could work with an installation.
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"> # # /etc/milo.conf # # Global parameters: # # timeout = |