[ 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
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