Doc on Debian Sparc Porting
Hi,
I hope this document will help Debian Sparc porting...
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Status of Debian Sparc Porting
Davide Barbieri, paci@dei.unipd.it
21 Gennaio 1997
Debian Sparc is a work in progress. It is not yet ready, but you can
work with dpkg in order to install some part of it, on an existing
linux box.
1. How to install Debian
You must install RedHat 4.0. Yes, it's true. RedHat is the only
distribution which can be installed on a Sparc machine, without much
more effort than installing it on a PC.
But you can install dpkg on your RedHat system, and you can try to
install some .deb packages.
From Bdale Garbee:
o pull the cpio sources from the 'bo' tree, unpack them, and do a
build followed by a "make install"... the cpio which ships with
RedHat isn't good enough for dpkg.
o pull the dpkg sources from the 'bo' tree, unpack them, and do a
build followed by a "make install".... this will give you a copy of
dpkg that's good enough for installing .deb files. You may have to
hack to keep it from trying to build the docs, since they depend on
a lot of Debian-specific tools, and you may have problems building
dselect. My approach was to be vicious about whacking the Makefile
to get around such problems until I had a dpkg installed and
working well enough to build other packages.
o the first time you try to run dpkg, it will complain about some
files not existing. I just "touch"'ed the files as they were
complained about and dpkg seemed to do the right things. Once you
get a "dpkg --list" to correctly show you that there are no
installed packages, you can grab some/all of the .deb files in the
directory tree on master.debian.org and try installing them.
o One of the hacks I've pulled is to symlink /etc/init.d and the
/etc/rc*.d directories to their RedHat counterparts in /etc/rc/, so
that as I install things, like xntpd, that need daemon launches,
they actually do the right things.
On every site mirroring Debian, you can find a directory bo/binary-
sparc. Try to install some of these packages (almost documentation,
which wouldn't hurt your system), and see if everything goes well.
Actually, via anonymous ftp, on test.dei.unipd.it, you can get some
'base' Debian packages for sparc. You can try them, but pay attention,
because they can really hurt your system!
2. Who is working on the port?
The leader is Bdale Garbee bdale@gag.com . Davide Barbieri
paci@dei.unipd.it is trying to help.
3. How can I help?
First of all join the debian-sparc mailing list. Then try to install
some of the packages already built, and report errors on debian-sparc.
If you can, pick up some debian sources, and try to compile them.
4. Disclaimer
Let's say that this document is (C) 1996 by me, Davide Barbieri
paci@dei.unipd.it . But most of the things are taken from what Bdale
Garbee has said or done.
This is a little document, but I hope it will grow, to help people use
and contribute to Debian Sparc porting project. Email me, if you have
something to add or to change in this document.
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