I'm here, finally...
I finally kicked myself in the head enough times to remember how to add myself
to debian-* mailing lists, and have joined debian-sparc and debian-alpha.
I've got an old Sun IPC running RedHat 4.0+updates, and am making some
progress getting a few .deb files built for a stage-1 Debian bootstrap effort.
So far, I have dpkg/sudo/cpio/tar/gzip/xntp built. Does it make sense for us
to create a directory somewhere on master to drop these "stage 1" .deb files
for sharing? It's clear that these aren't ready to go even in to the unstable
tree, as, for example, they have no shared lib dependencies coded in the .deb
files since I haven't installed any Debian'ized libs yet. On the other hand,
I'd hate for anyone to end up duplicating effort. Thoughts?
I still have a bad NVRAM part in the IPC, but it's on the UPS now, so I
shouldn't have to go through the manual Forth weirdness to reset the system
id and so forth too many more times... guess I should break down and order a
replacment part.
The extreme flakiness I was experiencing turned out to be a broken pin on a
SCSI terminator. I found and fixed that in the process of adding extra disk,
and the system has been much more stable since. The machine now has 12meg RAM,
a 400meg root/swap disk, and 3 660meg disks "to do stuff on". Some or all of
the latter may be reallocated once my Alpha box arrives.
Due to the nature of the networking the machine is behind, I need to keep the
number of folks with logins to a minimum. If anyone is really gung-ho about
having time and wanting to crank through building packages, say so.
For the RedHat folks on the list... the install went really smoothly with a
boot floppy and an NFS-mounted copy of the distribution. As Bruce has
mentioned already, I was startled at needing a graphics head, and had to drive
down to work and borrow one to get past the install. Now (post-install), I'm
using a serial console, and it works fine until the "Adding Swap:" line, at
which time it goes deaf/dumb. I can log in fine over the network once it
gets inetd up, but I'd like to get the serial console actually working. Any
hints on where to look? It also appears that there are some changes from the
Linus-standard kernel trees. Are these changes documented anywhere, or should
I recursively diff one of your kernel trees against a clean distribution tree
to see for myself?
Plugging along slowly (which is as fast as an IPC can go!)...
Bdale
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