Re: Debian SID on Ultra-30
Hi!
On 10/22/20 6:04 PM, Stan Johnson wrote:
> I just installed Debian SID on a Sparc Ultra-30. Thanks to everyone who
> makes this unsupported port continue to work!
Nice and you're welcome.
> My first question is, on Sparc systems, should the "Boot" partition be
> just large enough for GRUB? Should it be mounted as "/boot"? What I
> have works, but it forces continued use of SILO (and keeping /boot on
> sda1). I'm guessing if sda1 were a small Boot partition, I could
> install GRUB there from Debian SID and still boot Debian 7.8, Debian
> SID, and Gentoo.
You will need a boot partition large enough to hold at least GRUB, the kernel
and the initrd can be located on a different partition. But normally you
will have /boot large enough to provide space for GRUB, the kernel and
the initrd.
On newer SPARC systems (T4 and newer), a /boot partition is no longer required
and therefore not set up by debian-installer by default.
On older systems, it's always recommended to use a separate /boot partition due
to the fact that GRUB (and SILO) will use block lists to locate both the kernel
and the initrd and therefore circumventing the filesystem completely.
> Other questions I have are minor:
>
> 1) I'm using sysvinit-core instead of systemd, but it appears that all
> of the compiled desktop environments (even xfce4 and xinit) depend on
> systemd. Are there any desktop environment options for use with sysvinit?
As far as I know, you can still use XFCE4 without systemd. systemd support is
enabled with runtime detection only and normally involves a replacement for
systemd-logind only. But I'm not really an expert on this topic as I use systemd
on all my machines, even on old Amiga hardware.
> 2) When the system boots, apparently before the console and keyboard are
> set up, the font on the console is very large. This is minor, except
> that I might miss some messages during boot. Is there a Linux command
> line (or other) option to configure the console text size and font?
Depends on the console driver you are using. Which console driver are you
seeing loaded in the bootup messages? Sorry for asking, I'm using a serial
console all the time and all my active SPARCs are servers without a frame-
buffer.
> 3) Using the Sparc keyboard with the console, the first three characters
> I hit seem to be buffered and not immediately displayed, then everything
> works as expected. For example, if I log in as root, I don't see
> anything entering "roo", then "root" is displayed when I type the "t".
> This seems to happen only once, and it's also minor. I tried running
> agetty instead of getty on the console with the same result.
I haven't observed this issue but again, I'm not using a framebuffer on
SPARC.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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