Installation Notes for Sparc
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This page contains links to useful information about installation on various Sparc machines.
The official information for the Sarge release is in the [http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/sparc/ installation guide] and the [http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/sparc/release-notes/ release notes]
Very detailed netboot [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/04/msg00651.html installation notes] for ?SunBlade 150 using ["RC3"] version of the [http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer Debian installer]. Contains the instructions on setting up the rarpd and tftp server for netbooting. Thanks to Wiktor Wandachowicz. There is also [http://nishants.net/articles/sunblade150.htm this howto] available written by Nishant Sharma.
An unofficial [http://www.acm.cs.rpi.edu/~dilinger/iso.img netinst iso] with a all-modular IDE drivers. Fixes the problems with IDE device detection on ?SunBlades. Unfortunately, this change did not make it to Sarge installer. Thanks to Andres Salomon.
- If you get tired of the partitioner going mad with the currently installed (SunOS) disk on an old slow sparcstation, choose "go back" and then run down to the start a shell option. Then run parted which (a) works and (b) is fast. mklabel sun, mkpart primary ext2 0 x, mkpart primary ext2 x y etc. It seems you have to choose primary and ext2 here ... it doesn't actually do anything. Then quit, and exit the shell too. Go back to the installer's partition manager. Suddenly it is not going bonkers trying to make 67 Mb partitions. Persuade it that the first partition is / and the second is swap ... this will take about 3 minutes each on a sparcstation; no I do not know why the code is so slow. Then become confused because there is no Next button on your serial console. Keep pressing down, past the disk and its partitions and you get the Finish option you wanted.