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.
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Here is an example /etc/milo.conf file, which could work with an installation.
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"> # # /etc/milo.conf # # Global parameters: # # timeout = |