Re: Lenny on Sun T1000

[David Markey <dmarkey@comp.dit.ie>]

I had these issues, got around them though, boot time is slow because
the consoles are majorly messed up.

First off boot with init=/bin/sh, you'll be able to get some kind of a
shell then to make the following changes. I think you'll also have to do
mount -orw,remount / && mount /boot


Inittab:
change 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 to
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 ttyS0


and /boot/silo.conf


image=/vmlinuz
        label=Linux
        initrd=/initrd.img
        append="console=/dev/ttyS0"



You should be able to get a login now and boot time should be faster.

Tell me how you get on

All:
Was debian-sparc not tested on coolthreads servers? It probably should
as all new sun SPARC based machines are coolthreads based.

Cheers.





Jurij Smakov wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 10:27:08AM -0400, Elad Lahav wrote:
>> I installed Lenny on a Sun T1000 server (UltraSPARC T1, sun4v), and have 
>> a few issues:
>>
>> 1. Console not functioning after boot: The server boots and gets to the 
>> login prompt. However, the console is not responding to keys, and 
>> therefore it is not possible to log into the machine. This server is 
>> headless, and can only be accessed remotely. Since SSH was not enabled 
>> during installation, log in via the console is the only option, which 
>> means that I currently have no access to it.
>>
>> 2. Boot time is quite long, probably due to verbose kernel messages sent 
>> to the console. Previously, this machine was running Ubuntu 7.10 and the 
>> boot process was considerably faster.
>>
>> 3. The first installation attempt was unsuccessful:
>>    * Despite choosing to format the / partition, the installer decided to 
>> keep the existing data
>>    * The installer hung at "Generating locales" (might be related to the  
>> previous problem)
>>
>> I suspect that the first couple of issues may be solved with appropriate 
>> kernel boot parameters - any hints would be welcome.
> 
> There was a bug http://bugs.debian.org/504721 related to problems with 
> console detection, which was reproducible on my SunBlade 1000. It was 
> fixed, but I presume that for some reason the solution did not work 
> for your hardware. Please try appending console=ttyS0 (or whatever the 
> correct console device is) to see whether it will help, and if it 
> does, we'll try to figure out why the console device is not detected 
> properly.
> 
> Best regards,