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Re: booting a sunblade 100



On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 09:57:39AM -0700, Matt Dunford wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Has anyone successfully installed debian on a SunBlade 100?  I've been
> trying various netinst images:
> 
> http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r0a/sparc/iso-cd/debian-31r0a-sparc-netinst.iso
> http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/sparc/current/debian-testing-sparc-netinst.iso
> 
I seem to recall that there was a post to an "unofficial" netinst 
that would work when I asked this question about six weeks ago. If I recall
correctly, the netinst on the official images wasn't actually ready
for the Sun Blades as we released Sarge. I've helped to get
Debian installed on a Sun Blade at work: there were ide problems and
intermittent CD recognition problems.  

In the end, I think we disconnected the CD in order to get the 
thing to install and did a TFTP boot over the network. Not fun and not
ultra reliable. I'd like to try again but this was done in a hurry to
meet a fairly urgent deadline. Others also appear to be having problems.

One other solution which has worked is to use debootstrap from a Solaris
install. This takes considerable application but appears to work fine.
I _think_ this way you may have fewer problems. [Floppy, it seems, will
never work - something about obscure hardware interfaces and
non-standard connections.]

Not straightforward: almost enough to put me off Debian on architectures
other than Intel/AMD immediately :(

> I never get to the debian installer itself.  The stable complains of
> "cramfs: wrong magic".  The "current" pukes with "Remapping the
> kernel... Fast Instruction Access MMU Miss".
> 
> I've been googling around, reading the documention, trying everything
> I see other people doing.  I've played with various boot params:
> ramdisk_size=16000, mem=128m, etc.  I've got a stack of Blades
> collecting dust and I'm anxious to get them off Solaris.  Any
> thoughts?
> 
> -- 
> Sincerely,
> Matt Dunford
> Unix Systems Administrator
> DOE Joint Genome Institute
> url:   http://www.jgi.doe.gov
> email: madunford@lbl.gov
> phone: 925-296-5844
> 
> 
> -- 
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