yaboot considered harmful
I spent most of Saturday playing with LinuxPPC 2k. In
particular, I spent most of that time playing with yaboot,
the next generation boot loader for LinuxPPC.
It sucks. Hard.
Actually, to be fair, yaboot itself is fairly clever, albeit not
without its flaws. The instructions provided by
LinuxPPC.com however do not in any way, shape, form,
or fashion reflect what is actually necessary to get
yaboot to function properly. After a great deal of
searching on the linuxppc mailing lists, I found myself
in possession of a pile of unorganized information,
some of it contradictory. If you are in the same boat I
was in, you might be interested in this text file, which contains some of the
more useful tidbits.
At some point, I plan on organizing this better, since
there is precious little online help for yaboot. But in
interest of contributing to the community, here is the
distillation of what I discovered. This document contains my working
notes on getting LinuxPPC working on SCSI drives.
L-J 12-6 systems
This is actually a note for
macricht, since I am too lazy
to find his email. Two things you may want to check for
in your broken L-J code, if you haven't already are (1)
the starting positions of your atoms and (2) the signs
on the terms in the force calculation. If two of your
atoms are too close, the force between them becomes
large,
quickly. Since there is no damping, this plays hob with
the energy of the system. Also, if you botch the signs
when you take the derivative of the L-J energy
expression, and both components become effectively
repulsive, that can have untoward effects on the system
energy. I made that mistake when I first did L-J. Good
luck!