Re: Debian Sparc installations
John Chapman wrote:
> This weekend I installed (in a fairly minimal configuration) Debian Linux on
> two Sparcs: one LX and one SS2. I've got a few questions, several comments,
> and don't know whether one should file bug reports for a work in progress,
> so I'll post this here, in the hope that some kind soul will shove me in the
> right direction.
>
> Most things in the installation worked quite well. There were a couple of
> problems with the SS2, though; I had put a brand new drive into it, and
> (perhaps because of this?) the installation program didn't want to partition
> and format the drive, but kept bouncing me back to the "select a color or
> mono monitor" screen. I ran fdisk and mke2fs from the vc2, did network
> config by hand, and copied the files over onto one of the partitions via an
> nfs mount, but the installation program still wouldn't let me mount the
> partitions. Finally I guessed that I should mount /dev/sda1 to /target, and
> everything suddenly worked. I'm quite at a loss to explain why this can be
> done by hand, but not by the menu interface. (Incidentally, this was with
> the tftpboot image.) A possible bug in the installation program?
For sure :-((
The installation program is providing its own fdisk parser (libfdisk it is).
It may fail on garbage in the partition sector of the disk... I didn't
experienced with this problem and I don't have time to fix it now. Sorry.
The workaround is to run fdisk manually then the installation program should
stop to segfault after the system has reread the partition table of your hard
drive. Are you sure you needed to run all the steps by hand ?
> The floppy installation on the LX didn't have this problem (but, then, it
> had a previously-used hard drive.) I didn't try out all of the disks; at
> the "install from a mounted partition" point, I did an nfs mount of the
> base set, and continued from there. There was no long delay in searching for
> the drivers or base set at all. However, both on the SS2 and the LX, the
> "insert drivers into the kernel" step fails; the program complains about not
> being able to find sed (I counldn't find it, either), and, as a result,
> nothing on the drivers floppy gets added. I'm not sure if it should, yet,
It will be fixed in the next bootdisks release.
> and I don't miss much except the serial ports, which don't get configured at
> all. Perhaps someone can give me some tips.
>
> Other problems: "more" is immediately broken, since the ncurses package is
> a more recent version, and there is no package with the old version still
> available. I use "less" all the time, anyway, but this may also have broken
> other things in the utils package. I can't reinstall it, since the package
> depends upon the old ncurses library; should I just make a symlink for now?
> Or recompile them? gcc and friends seem to work OK (I tried them out once on
> "frotz"), which is a very good sign indeed.
In fact, util-linux is out-dated and should be recompiled.
# dpkg -I util-linux_2.7.1-3.deb
...
Pre-Depends: libc6 (>= 2.0.91), ncurses3.4
...
> Since I was downloading packages ad libitum, I didn't try running dselect or
> apt, so I can't report (or complain) about them. I have noticed a couple of
> little things which need fixing, though:
>
> jed requires jed-common; the Packages listing states that this is in
> binary-sparc, but it's in binary-all. The same applies to tetex-base, and
> several others.
Not a problem at all because all binary-all packages are symlinked to each
binary-<arch> tree.
# cd slink/main/binary-sparc/editors
# ls -l jed-common_0.98.7-14.deb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 49 Jan 21 21:25 jed-common_0.98.7-14.deb -> ../../binary-all/editors/jed-common_0.98.7-14.deb
> X fails with complaints about the lack of /dev/kbd. Is this something which
> gets made with a proper dselect installation? I would run makedev, but I've
> noticed that the Other Distribution assigns /dev/kbd the major number 11,
> minor 0, which is scd0 with Debian, and I'd rather leave it alone until I
> know what the Right Thing To Do is. And there's probably some marvelous
> Debian package which sets up everything correctly, anyway :-)
Aargh :-(( In fact I lose the fixes I made to MAKEDEV to handle sparc specific
devices for the base system. I fixed the stuff in place, so it was
overwritten by a new makedev package when I did an upgrade and I completely
forgot to send a patch to the maintainer. Grrr :-((
I will rewrite it for the next bootdisks release. They will provide /dev/kbd,
/dev/fb* & /dev/sunmouse in the base system.
BTW, /dev/kbd is really major 11, minor 0 but *char* device while /dev/scd0 is
major 11, minor 0 and *block* device.
Try the following commands to create missing devices:
# mknod /dev/kbd c 11 0
# mknod /dev/fb0 c 29 0
# mknod /dev/sunmouse c 10 6
> All in all, I'm quite impressed and delighted that so much works so smoothly.
> And I suppose I should volunteer to help in some way. Any suggestions?
We don't have enough testers to discover the broken packages.
Would you want to be one of them ?
Thanks for your report.
--
Eric Delaunay | "La guerre justifie l'existence des militaires.
delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr | En les supprimant." Henri Jeanson (1900-1970)
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