Bug#296735: installation-reports: [sparc] unusable menus in d-i on Sun Blade 1500

[Matthias Merz <matmerz@ira.uka.de>]

Hello again,

On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 11:16:16AM -0500, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Matthias Merz wrote:
> >Tried it today, but no effect. As far as I can tell there isn't any
> >framebuffer-support active at this time. Could it be that the
> >Sun-Console doesn't support UTF-8 in its native mode? Perhaps using
> >framebuffer might even solve these problems. (just guessing but might
> >be worth a try...)
> 
> :-(. One more thing you could try is 2.6 netboot image from RC2 [0] or a 
> more recent one [1]. If the problem is really due to the _lack_ of 
> framebuffer support, it should work, since CONFIG_FB_RADEON is enabled in 
> our 2.6 kernels. Enabling it in 2.4 is on my todo list, if it will really 
> fix the problem, I'll be motivated to do it faster :-).
> 
> [1] http://people.debian.org/~joshk/d-i/images/daily/sparc64/netboot/2.6/

So today at last I tried that again and can reply. I tried the 2.6
images, but there seems to be another problem with the framebuffer.

The 2.6 kernel from joshk booted fine, but the CRT doesn't display
anything - same result with rc3-images. The CRT doesn't go into sleep,
but the Power-LED begins to blink...  I assume, that this is not a
frequency issue as the CRT here is an EIZO 19" model which I would
expect to synchronize.

As the 2.6 image did recognize the IDE harddisk, I was now able to
complete the installation using serial console though and using the
provided 2.4 with working IDE I can now use the system ;-)

So the 2.6 framebuffer seems not to be effective regarding this
problem.

If I find the time, I will try some debugging using self-compiled
kernels (I will have to compile some kernels due to unusable tg3.c)


Thanks for your time though!
Yours
Matthias Merz