Sparc installation
Hi!
I've just installed Debian on a Sparc32. With no monitor. I installed
this using the serial console as output, and the netboot image as
installation method.
Some /proc/cpuinfo:
cpu : Texas Instruments, Inc. - MicroSparc
fpu : TI MicroSparc on chip FPU
promlib : Version 3 Revision 2
prom : 2.9
type : sun4m
ncpus probed : 1
ncpus active : 1
BogoMips : 49.76
MMU type : TI Tsunami
contexts : 64
nocache total : 1048576
nocache used : 87808
And some free info:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 44400 27588 16812 0 2516 20160
-/+ buffers/cache: 4912 39488
Swap: 124608 1684 122924
This is my report, based mainly on the differences I found with the i386
installations. It might be that everything was just right, but it's just
different in Sparc.
About display
-------------
This installation had no blue screens, everything was black and white, and
just plain ASCII characters, but amazingly, there were BOLD characters!
It seems that it's deleting the screen twice, making it
really slow on a minicom. It clears the screen when the user
presses enter, and then clears it again just before displaying the
next screen.
Installation Steps
------------------
It didn't ask for language just country "based on your language choice".
It didn't ask for keyboard.
DHCP worked fine.
The "Free memory" step failed.
No guided partitioning option at the beginning of the partitioning.
It did appear afterwards, but did nothing but just show a
"Manually edit the partition table" message
No xfs or jfs filesystems.
And then it took a LONG time to get everything installed. But it worked.
It rebooted properly.
Base config prompted me for keyboard. But keymap families had
no names (no qwerty), I chose blindly.
Then came the usual timezone, users, apt, etc.
It took around 3 hours in total to install this weird thing, but the only
real failure was the low memory option. It seemed it worked anyway.
So: SUCCESS!!! We have an OK for netboot+Sparc32.
***
I have the full minicom log of all this if anyone cares to have a
look at it.
--
Lots of love!
Marga
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