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Re: Installation problems SPARCstation 5



Romain Dolbeau wrote:

Ryle Goehausen wrote:

Naturally of course, after installing I go to reboot. I thought that maybe
there was some pecularity with the install relating to the X-Windows
system or however video is being displayed, because I know my video
chip is 24-bit and it should be using the XSun24 X server, but I don't
know how to select or configure that.


Are you sure of that ? SS5 come with no on-board video ; they do
have a dedicated slot for a 24 bit card, but they're often found
with a regular (T)GX, which is a SBUS 8 bit card.

I have no idea how to boot up with that parameter, and I was thinking
of trying to reinstall and typing that in before I booted up off the
CDROM, but now when I try to boot off the CDROM it just automatically
takes me to my hard drive installation.


The magic combination of key is called 'stop-A' ; the stop
key is the top-left key of the leftmost block of keys
(just below the big lonely help key). The 'A' key is
ususally not a problem to find ;-) It will halt whatever
the system is doing and drop you into the openboot
monitor (if you've never used a Sun before, it's basically
a really, really, really advanced bios).

From that point you can type system commands, such as 'boot cdrom'
or 'boot disk' ; there's plenty of resources on the net explaining
the openboot. A good place to start is <http://www.sunhelp.org/>.
It should allow you to boot the cdrom with whatever options
you need.

The one point of interest on a SS5 is whether its CPU is
a 170 Mhz TurboSPARC (which is a crappy CPU not well supported)
or a flavor of MicroSPARC II (between 70 and 110 Mhz, and
resonably well supported). /proc/cpuinfo will tell you
that if you can get to a linux command-line. Anyway, it
won't be a fast computer...

Good luck !

_________________________________________________________________________
Romain,
Ryle is correct .... I had the very same problem you are describing. In my case I was using a 24bit card when installing debian on my SS5 .. It is supported by Sun but I have not looked to see if anyone has made it work in linux. I swapped it out with a CG6 and had no problems there after. I have three sparcs and one UltraSparc. I found that if you drift outside the normal components you will have a much harder time with linux driver support. If you insist on using the 24 bit card you will need to do some research. Search the debian sparc mail archives. Ive also found the gentoo forums archives informative from time to time. You can pick up a CG6 or Turbo frame buffer on EBay cheaply enough .. If you need me to verfiy my 24 bit part number against yours let me know. Good Luck...




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