Re: adivce about sunblade150 [status & hints]
On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, Juan Antonio [ISO-8859-1] A?el Cabanelas wrote:
Dear Mr. Wandachowicz,
I have found a mail from you to debian-boot list about the installation
of Debian GNU/Linux in Ultrasparc Sunblade 150. It was about the
keyboard. I have the same problem and I have tried a lot of different
iso images, so I would like to know if you have had success with the
installation and which image you have used.
If you have had success with another Linux distribution I would like to
know it.
Thanks in advance.
The installation process is currently buggy for SunBlade 150.
But my efforts with resolving the issues pressed the matter forward,
and the problems are being resolved.
Using a lot of my time and gaining experience bit after bit I was
able to do a clean install, however. But this process was complicated
and I'm not sure if I can recommend it to you.
Some problems plagued (plagues?) debian-installer CD's:
(1) there were missing kernel modules on such CD, resulting in non-working
USB-keyboard. This has been resolved, I think.
(2) there is some problem with kernel configuration and/or version,
which renders the installer to be unable to detect and mount any IDE
drives (cd/hdd). Thus one cannot continue the installation, because
installer components are located on the same CD, which can't be mounted.
This has been reported many times an I'm waiting until it will be
resolved too.
(3) In the main menu there can be black boxes instead of some national
characters. There is a workaround for this, however. You can read about
this in the "Debian Installer Parameters" section in "Debian Sarge
installation Manual" at:
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.sparc/ch05s02.html
Recent ISO images have the problem (1) resolved, while the problem (2)
still exist. If you ask the developers long enough [nicely!], the second
one will perish too :-) And we all be happy installing Debian od Blades.
I already got some answers to the problem (2), which can be found at:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/04/msg00048.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/04/msg00052.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/04/msg00092.html (***)
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/04/msg00062.html
Of special interest may be the post marked as (***) where the poster
suggests to do a netinstall with 2.6 kernel. I didn't have enough time
to do this, but if you want, try it and post the results on the
debian-boot list. Alternatively, ask for support there.
The netboot images can be found at:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ports-status
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-sparc/current/images/
The CD images itself can be found at:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/cd/
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/sarge_d-i/sparc/rc3/
You can also be even more specific and search for the answer on another
mailing list: http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc
(simply send an email to "debian-sparc (at) lists.debian.org")
If you are still interested in installing Debian, I would recommend
doing a netboot, too. It's quite easy once you know all the details.
Read more about it here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/04/msg00004.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/04/msg00014.html
http://www.de-brauwer.be/docs/debian_on_sun.html
You don't really need to install TFTP server on another Blade running
Debian. On Solaris 9 there is such a server installed by default and
you can easily use it to boot another machine.
Once in a while there were some boot images on the www.phunnypharm.org
but now I couldn't see them anymore. This was the first place we got
the netboot image which let us install working Debian woody on Blade.
The original images didn't work at that time (over a year ago).
Hope this helps a bit,
Wiktor Wandachowicz
PS.
Sorry for cross-posting, but I thought this may be important right now
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