Sparcstation 2 Install Report
I've been trading some hardware around recently, and my IPC and Sparcstation 1+
have been superceded by a Sparcstation 2 with some sort of Weitek processor
upgrade. I hope eventually to park this in one of my equipment racks with a
serial port on one of my other machines as a console. I needed a break from
what I've been working on recently, and wanted to make sure the hardware was
ok (the disk was shot, otherwise it worked fine), so I sat up last night and
did a debian-sparc install on this machine.
I ran into the same problem that Bertrand Leconte reported when attempting to
boot the network install kernel with a serial console. I remembered that
someone had suggested I try the rescue floppy set at vger.rutgers.edu, so I
went and picked it up... ftp://vger.rutgers.edu/pub/linux/Sparc/rescue/ is
the location.
With the two-disk rescue set, it was easy to boot the machine, and do the
fdisk/mke2fs/mount stuff. I then brought up the network interface, and used
the ftp client on the rescue set to pull over the base1_2.tgz file from the
970328 disks-sparc snapshot. I unpacked it, brought over the 2.0.30 kernel
image from ftp://vger.rutgers.edu/pub/linux/Sparc/images/, cobbled a silo.conf
file and ran 'silo -r /mnt' to install it on the target disk, and was almost
able to boot from the disk.
The biggest hangup was that I needed to customize an /etc/inittab file to start
a getty on the serial port and turn off the virtual console gettys, and I
needed a rational /etc/fstab file. I crafted these on another machine and used
tar with a floppy to move the files across.
I iterated a few times booting off the rescue set and patching things up on
the target disk, and within an hour or so I had a happily working debian-sparc
base system. I didn't keep very good notes during this period... but it was
all pretty obvious stuff... essentially the stuff that 'configure the base
system' does for you in a real Debian install.
The only grumble at boot time now is a complaint about /dev/rtc not existing.
I went through and installed a few updated packages, but I haven't tried to
compile anything yet, and I haven't pulled over the libc6 stuff yet. Given
recent reports about that stuff, I'll probably stop right here until I have
more time to play.
I don't have much more time to work on the system this weekend, but the ease
of installation from the rescue floppies seemed like it was worth commenting
on to the group. Pulling the disk images apart and seeing what they do about
handling the serial console issue might be a good idea. It would also be good
to get a new disks-sparc snapshot together sometime, and see about making a
bootable floppy set. I'll help with that eventually if no one else does it
first... but I won't have any big chunks of time to work on this for at least
another two months. If it handled serial consoles right, the network boot
process would be ok... but it's much less hassle to cut a couple of floppies
than it is to set up all the rarp/tftp stuff if this is the only reason you're
doing it...
Bdale
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