installation report: [sparc64] SunBlade 150 success
Hello debian/sparc and d-i folks!
It's been very busy two last weeks for me and ten SunBlade 150 machines
in our lab. Finally I succeeded with installing fresh Debian sarge
installation, but the steps I've had to follow were long and painful.
Actually, I'm still shaking after such extraordinary experience.
All of this is derived from the fact that the recent Debian installer
images (it doesn't matter whether I used netboot, netinst or
businesscard) are unable to get access to the USB keyboard on our
[exotic?] hardware. See bug #278215 for more information on it.
Using one of the last working images, dated 20040511 (which you can find
at http://ics.p.lodz.pl/~wiktorw/sparc_d-i), and combining it with one
of the newest d-i images, I was able to run the installer with USB
keyboard. More, I completed all the steps until d-i displayed that it
has finished the installation. Finally!
One thing to note is that after reboot the machine displayed kernel
panic. Installed kernel (2.4.27) has had errors in its initial ramdisk,
so I simply copied a working 2.4.26 kernel. And it helped.
For this to happen I needed to create several partitions, extract
initrd's from cd's, copy the root dirs form cd's, copy the contents of
extracted files, tweak them a bit, copy over an old 2.4.26 kernel and
its modules, and finally, reboot the machine from partition prepared
this way.
Here I would like to congratulate all the people involved in creating
the new debian installer, because it differs substantialy from the
May'2004 version. And these are very good changes, IMHO.
The same goes for new tasksel (although it wanted to install mail server
by default -- rather silly idea for desktop machine), as well as for
aptitude's tasks (which are perfect!).
I'm not providing you with regular installation report (yet), in hope
that I will be able to contact some developers interested in repeating
the steps above. Or possibly, to work out a satisfying solution.
If anybody needs some installation logs, hardware details, has any idea
of right kernel configuration or simply wants me to try something, feel
free to mail me. I'll do my best to help.
With kind regards,
Wiktor Wandachowicz
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