Re: Can't get any GUI to run on my Sun SPARC
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 08:30:08PM +0000, Ryan wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been trying for the past Month to get my SUN Blade 1000 with
> UltraSparcIIITo run with Debian 5.0.7, Everything installs no problems at all
> the system runs without any hiccups at all... except 1, I really need to install
> a GUI as my Business Partner has no experience with Linux at all but has
> "worked" with Linux desktop and can manage with it I do have have some
> experience with the command line but only the basics, i have tried 5 different
> Linux distro's for SPARC, 2 of them don't even boot, 2 will only work if no GUI
> is installed, the last being Solaris loads fine, GUI works fine but the commands
> are confusing (used to Debian based Commands), and is a nightmare to set up as
> WEB server, I want to re install Debian as i found it to be the most stable but
> nothing i have tried has helped, the only thing i have learnt from this
> experience is how to Google more efficiently please can someone help me get a
> GUI to work on my system.
Your machine most likely has the XVR-500 or XVR-600 graphics card. In
Linux there is only a basic framebuffer driver for them, which,
unfortunately, cannot be used to run X. There are some fairly recent
discussions about it on sparc-linux mailing list (and they do not look
very promising):
http://marc.info/?t=128959505600005&r=1&w=4
http://marc.info/?t=128960437300001&r=1&w=4
In short, if you absolutely need to run X on this machine, your best
bet is to pick some supported PCI graphics card and stick it in.
> The most common fault i have come accross in Debian is after running the command
> apt-get install Gnome, it goes throught the whole download procedure then i type
> in : "startx", the screen flashes black a few times, then i get a blue screen
> telling me that X has failed and has been disabled and that i must reconfigure
> it, I tried that but absolutely nothing works I have come across this problem
> many times in my Google searches but none with a helpful solution, If I have to
> i am willing to use a much older distro to get this thing working properly with
> a GUI, I don't even think it really needs to be updated, as long as its stable
> and works with a GUI, all the machine has to really do is run as web server and
> mail server, as its going to be hosting my company's website and mail.
>
> Please please please can someone help me solve my problem
>
> PS i can't really give you any other information as to what graphics card the
> thing is using as i haven't found the command yet that will allow me to view the
> graphics card details, all i can say is its the standard graphics card that came
> built into the machine, I don't have any documentation on the machine either as
> it was bought second hand.
--
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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