Re: Debian on a Sparcstation 2

[Martin <inkubus@interalpha.co.uk>]

On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 21:34 -0700, Peter Crawford wrote:
> An old Sparcstation 2 has been running Woody since
> it was installed ca. 2002 by diskette -> network.
> Recently I've added an external 18 GB drive and
> am interested to install a newer Debian to it.  Can
> anyone comment _pro_ or _con_ about installing etch
> or lenny or squeeze on a Sparc 2?
> 
> Efforts described below have failed.  If a system
> upgrade is warranted, can anyone suggest how to
> accomplish it.
You may want to check when support for SPARC V7 / sun4c machines was
dropped.  For releases where SPARC V8 / sun4m was supported, the
differences may be minimal and recompiling a few key binaries may be
sufficient.  I believe that Debian is moving to supporting only SPARC V9
based machines so for very recent code you may have problems.

HTH

Cheers,
 - Martin