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Re: Setting up an old Debian on an old Sun



Jerome Warnier wrote:
On Mon, 2011-02-28 at 19:10 +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
For reasons that seemed good at the start of the weekend, I'm trying to get a copy of Sarge onto a SPARCstation IPC. Basically, I want something compact with a 2.4 kernel as a repository for some kernel hacking I did a few years ago.

The old IPC won't boot from CD, so I'm doing the installation on an SS20. That's fine, except that I don't think it's putting SILO's first-stage loader where the IPC's ROM can find it: if I do something like boot sd(0,3,2) it pauses and then sits there flickering the drive activity light without any indication that it's found SILO.

I don't see why it would not boot from a SCSI CDROM, except it needs to
use a special block size (512 bytes if I remember correctly).
Right: http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_ipc/

Can anybody remember the magic incantation needed to get this going?

Honestly, IPC's architecture is "sun4c", while SS20 is "sun4m".
Though sun4c is not supported by Sarge or Etch, nor even Woody it seems,
which was the first Debian to ship with kernel 2.4 (2.4.18).
You're out of luck there.

I definitely had it working reliably, but for some reason failed to note exactly what steps I'd followed- there's always a possibility that I'd manually copied a sun4c kernel. I'll check the CD jumpering but my recollection was that the IPC quite simply couldn't see it as a bootable device.

The frustrating thing was that this happened after I'd gone to the trouble of grafting a new battery onto the back of the NVRAM device. It was good practice though- a U1 that I use for network testing has just similarly gone down so that's next in line.

--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]


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