Re: [ANNOUNCE] debian-installer floppy images available for SPARC
Maybe you can help explain to me why my pre-made kernel won't work, since
evidently you're doing some relatively low-level stuff here? ;)
See my earlier thread regarding the kernel being unable to find an MS-DOS
partition table (!!!) and freaking out.
On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, Joshua Kwan wrote:
> [ Note: crossposted to both -sparc and -boot, language is less technical
> than usually seen on -boot ;) ]
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm proud to announce that we now have sparc targets and resultant
> images for kernel/root/driver floppies for the new Debian Installer
> (sarge). They are not yet being autobuilt by Jeff Bailey (although I
> suspect they will get pulled in sometime soon, because he builds from
> the latest Subversion) so I have been building them since this evening.
>
> Everything can be found here:
> http://june.voxel.net/~joshk/d-i/images/
>
> floppy/root.img is a common root image for both sparc32 and sparc64. It
> contains drivers for SBus network devices as well as the usual minimal
> Debian Installer environment that is just able to pull down the rest of
> its components.
>
> sparc32/floppy and sparc64/floppy contain boot images (kernel version
> 2.4.24) and network driver images. The net-drivers images contain IPv6
> and PPP drivers, but they were mostly space-fillers because the sparc64
> one contains a pile of PCI network device drivers.
>
> Before you think about installing debian-installer for sparc in general,
> consider these caveats:
>
> * Sparc32: If you only have a Happy Meal SBus ethernet adapter in your
> machine, you will need to drop to a shell sometime during the install
> and modprobe sunhme. The Discover software that is used to detect
> stuff like this does not support SBus. This will either be addressed
> in discover or in the Linux 2.4.25 kernel images for sparc, whichever
> are done first. The Sparc64 kernels have sunhme built in so this won't
> be a problem for you Ultra folks.
>
> * Floppies: If you need to use the net-drivers floppy for any reason,
> you will have to drop to the PROM and call eject-floppy to switch
> floppies. This is due to the new eject-udeb still waiting in the NEW
> queue that we will later use to eject the root floppy right before
> we hit the installer.
>
> * Serial console: A very elusive bug in our prebaseconfig package, which
> sets up an inittab that sets up the serial console you're installing
> from for the next boot, doesn't work all the time. Chances are it won't.
> You will have to boot the floppy again and mount your root partition
> from there and edit /usr/share/sysvinit/inittab to your needs, and save
> it to /etc/inittab. A fix for this is top priority and will probably be
> figured out tomorrow, but if you can figure it out straightaway, by all
> means do, and send a patch ;)
>
> In other words: right now, unless you like pain, you probably don't
> want to try installing if all you have is a serial cable.
>
> * General: Do not choose 'unstable' as your distribution when installing.
> A new package in the base system has updated its dependencies, and
> debootstrap needs to be fixed before you can bootstrap unstable.
>
> Enjoy! Do remember to file installation reports (see
> /root/installation-reports.template after the install) detailing how
> your install went.
>
> --
> Joshua Kwan
>
--
J. L. Blank, Systems Administrator, twu.net
Reply to: