My story so far
Greetings,
I've got a SparcStation 10 on my desk. Here's what I've done so far...
1. Got rescue boot and root disks from vger.rutgers.edu via ftp.
2. Got (getting old) base1_2.tar.gz Debian sparc tarball.
3. Did a "boot floppy" to get the rescue disks loaded. I had
partitioned my disk at target 1 ahead of time using Sun's format. I
made ext2 filesystems on the partitions, and untarred the Debian
base tarball over the new ext2 filesystems. (Once SILO came up from
the rescue floppy, I booted the linux-2.0 kernel.)
4. Copied mingetty from the rescue disk into the (to become) Debian
root /usr/sbin and copied and edited a sensible /etc/fstab and
/etc/inittab and /etc/init.d/network. It took a couple of
iterations.
5. Now my Debian booting has become:
Sun boot prom: "boot floppy"
Rescue floppy's SILO prompt: "linux-2.0 root=/dev/sda1"
6. I edited the perl source for dpkg so that it would default to
"sparc" for architecture instead of "i386". Dunno if I had to,
because I reverted to using ftp to get the first batch of new .deb
files from the hamm sparc directories.
7. Sort of followed the libc5->libc6 upgrade path. First to be
upgraded was ld.so, followed by libc6, new libc5, ..., perl...
8. Now I'm running dselect to get more things.
9. Hmm. No X server. Found .rpms at vger.
10. alien does extract the .rpm files into a directory, then some bug
happens. At least I find an Xsun executeable.
file: Symbol `_IO_2_1_stderr_' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
11. Xsun doesn't run. Read a FAQ and make entries in /dev/ for
framebuffer and mouse. Can't find fonts. So I use Debian packages and
bring up an X font server. "Xsun -fp tcp/localhost:7100" runs, but
can't find a color database. Found rgb.db in another .rpm. OK. Now
xdm is running, but not starting a server. But now I can do:
Xsun -fp tcp/localhost:7100 -query localhost
and I have X.
12. I've got a useful system now, not yet having compiled anything
locally. Most things work (some things say "consider
re-linking"). I'd like to have an X aware emacs, but the one I got
is OK for now.
13. NIS doesn't work for me. Is this expected?
===========
Questions for the Debian-sparc community:
1. What libc, gcc versions should I be using to compile Debian/hamm
packages?
2. I'd like to build my own new kernel. Any suggestions of a good
kernel version to try for a first time (on sparc - I do i386
kernels all the time). Does kernel-package work on sparc?
3. My silo package came from the root tarball. Where is a current
silo .deb file? (I suppose I should configure silo on my own system
RSN.)
4. What do I need to do to compile new binary-sparc .deb files and
upload them to the debian ftp servers? (I will look for archives of
this mailing list - I haven't yet and just subscribed.)
Enough for now.
-Maitland
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