Debian SID on Ultra-30
Hello,
I just installed Debian SID on a Sparc Ultra-30. Thanks to everyone who
makes this unsupported port continue to work!
My Ultra 30 has 1.5 GB memory and runs at 296 MHz. Several years ago, I
installed Debian 7.8 on this system, and it works pretty well, except
for web browser options. At the time, it looks like I made a mistake by
installing SILO (1.4.14) on /dev/sda1 along with Debian 7.8:
root@ultra-30:/# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 136.73 GiB, 146815737856 bytes, 286749488 sectors
Disk model: ST3146807LC
Geometry: 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17849 cylinders
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 =
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: sun
Device Start End Sectors Size Id Type Flags
/dev/sda1 0 15631244 15631245 7.5G 1 Boot
/dev/sda2 15631245 31262489 15631245 7.5G 83 Linux native
/dev/sda3 0 286744184 286744185 136.7G 5 Whole disk
/dev/sda4 31262490 62508914 31246425 14.9G 83 Linux native
/dev/sda5 62508915 66412709 3903795 1.9G 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda6 66412710 286744184 220331475 105.1G 83 Linux native
I'm using sda1 for Debian 7.8, sda2 for Debian SID, and (eventually)
sda4 for Gentoo; sda3 is not used.
My first question is, on Sparc systems, should the "Boot" partition be
just large enough for GRUB? Should it be mounted as "/boot"? What I
have works, but it forces continued use of SILO (and keeping /boot on
sda1). I'm guessing if sda1 were a small Boot partition, I could
install GRUB there from Debian SID and still boot Debian 7.8, Debian
SID, and Gentoo.
Other questions I have are minor:
1) I'm using sysvinit-core instead of systemd, but it appears that all
of the compiled desktop environments (even xfce4 and xinit) depend on
systemd. Are there any desktop environment options for use with sysvinit?
2) When the system boots, apparently before the console and keyboard are
set up, the font on the console is very large. This is minor, except
that I might miss some messages during boot. Is there a Linux command
line (or other) option to configure the console text size and font?
3) Using the Sparc keyboard with the console, the first three characters
I hit seem to be buffered and not immediately displayed, then everything
works as expected. For example, if I log in as root, I don't see
anything entering "roo", then "root" is displayed when I type the "t".
This seems to happen only once, and it's also minor. I tried running
agetty instead of getty on the console with the same result.
thanks again!
-Stan Johnson
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