MIPS based Cobalt machines are a variety of quite similar machines, all no
longer in production but still quite popular.  There were i386 based Cobalt
machines later, but these have virtually nothing in common with the MIPS
based ones and are not supported.

There are the following machines:

 - Cobalt Qube 2700 (aka Qube 1): has no serial console
 - Cobalt RaQ1
 - Cobalt Qube 2 (aka Qube 2800), also rebranded as "Gateway Qube"
 - Cobalt RaQ2
 - Cobalt RaQ2+: two network interfaces
 - Cobalt CacheRaQ: a RaQ2 with two IDE interfaces

Basically, the RaQ1, Qube 2, RaQ2 (and RaQ2 and CacheRaQ, which are really
just variations) are the same from the point of view of debian-installer.
The only difference is the Qube 2700 because it doesn't have a serial
console.

All MIPS based Cobalt machines have:
 - a MIPS CPU (MHz can vary, but the same kernel works on all)
 - at least one network interface
 - Standard IDE drive
 - A LCD that is 2x16 (plus some buttons)
 - Fairly non-standard EDO RAM (needs 3.3V)
 - A USB chip, but it's not actually exported (i.e. no connectors)

Cobalt firmware:

The original Cobalt firmware has several restrictions.  For example, it can
only boot from a partition that is ext2 revision 0 (i.e. the old ext2 type).
Furthermore, there's a restriction on the size of the kernel it can load.
Fortunately, Peter Horton wrote a replacement boot loader, known as CoLo
(Cobalt Loader).  Even though you could in theory overwrite the firmware
with CoLo, we don't do this: instead, we use the firmware to load CoLo
(i.e. chain mode) and then use CoLo to load the kernel (and possibly an
initrd).  This means that the only real restriction left is that the /boot
partition has to be ext2 rev 0 so the firmware can load CoLo.

The firmware will usually look for a file called vmlinux.gz, so that's what
we call CoLo.  Apparently, there are variations of the firmware which look
for another filename, so we also create symlinks for vmlinux_RAQ.gz and
vmlinux_raq-2800.gz.

The firmware also supports booting via the network.  You can activate that
by pressing the left and right cursor button at the same time (it'll say
"Network booting").  The firmware will then load vmlinux.gz via NFS -
however, note that the firmware does not care about the NFS path you set.
It will *always* load /nfsroot/vmlinux.gz.  There's no way around this.
FHS violation, yeah, but the company no longer exists, so who do you sue?

CoLo:

CoLo is a fairly nice bootloader.  It reads a config file from
/boot/default.colo.  There is good documentation.  The "colo" package also
includes a number of tools, for example to put stuff on the LCD.  One note
regarding the LCD: while it is 2x16, only 2x14 can be displayed in menus
because the cursor will take one character on each side.

debian-installer: we support installations via SSH (the default) as well
as via the serial console.  In the case of SSH, a password is either
pre-seeded, or a random one is generated and displayed on the LCD.

Upstream contact:
  Peter Horton <pdh@colonel-panic.org> (CoLo and kernel)
  Yoichi Yuasa <yoichi_yuasa@tripeaks.co.jp> (kernel)

