Marlon Ott wrote:
What a deal... $3800 for a brand new SunBlade 100 with all the bells and whistles. Actually came loaded with Solaris 8(!) -> Had to argue with SUN for a month to get a stinkin "9" CD (Gosh thanks McNealy, hope the 3800.00 covers your CD costs). Entire day spent just loading Solaris 9... looks better, but is just as "useless" (UNIX with a GUI -zzzzzzzz), and the piece of junk reboots on its own now. Let's see, Linux is so very hot - who makes it for SPARC? Out of hundreds of distro's - Only Debian (thank you)... I actually sent money for the disk set and waited three weeks. It's always good to support development, yes? Well folks.... too bad I cannot load Debian. From the support site's "SunBlade 100" string it appears that I should remove my video card (ROTFLMAO), and type mystical undocumented commands at the SILO prompt while praying. Outcome? The new CD's are in the trash, the nice $$$ SUN monitor is now hooked to my reliable W2K Adv Server box, and the SunBlade is great for holding up the monitor. Sorry Linux geeks... I give up.
I know you're frustrated, and understandably so. I had a rough time getting Debian installed on my Sunblade 100. But once it was there, I sure liked it better than Solaris 8. (I've never tried 9.) In addition to that frustration, there's just the general frustration of dealing with Sun, as evidenced by your efforts to get a Solaris 9 CD.
I never was able to get the installer to boot off the CD, but being in a lab environment, I was able to use the tftpboot image and start the installer that way. From there on, it was a piece of cake (but only because I've done numerous Debian installs on x86 and Mac and therefore knew my way around -- it'd have been a nightmare if I had never installed Debian before).
I assure you, I did not need to remove any video cards (but then, I was using the built-in integrated video) or do any other hardware work (although I guessed wrong the first-time 'round on choosing the keyboard type, which provided me with several minutes of entertainment).
Since you're posting to the Debian-User mailing list, I can only assume you never found the Debian-Sparc mailing list. Of course, as the name implies, it's much more suited to Debian on SunBlades than is this list.
I'm hoping that this post was just a pressure/stress-relieving rant, and after a good night's sleep you'll rethink your decision to give up on Debian for the 'Blade, if for no other reason than to increase your knowlege/experience. But even more than that, once installed, I think you'd like it.
Kent