Hello

[Jonathan Andrews <jon@jonshouse.co.uk>]

Im new and probably stupid so please be patient :-) I also cant spell,
so pleas forgive !

I'm not a troll - and im not after a fight, I just wanted to share with
people my experience of installing Debian on sparc while it was still
fresh in my mind !   Its a long rambling account - sorry ! I just offer
it as feedback for the people in charge :-)


*****Begin rant !
Last week I was given a couple of Sparc Ultra1 Creator 3d workstations
(saved from the skip !)

I plugged in and sat down to learn Solaris 2.6  Wow - that was dull ...
It was a minimum install, no C compiler - nothing much going on in X ...
I got bored quickly.

I'm running Redhat 9 on a couple of 1.3Ghz Athlons as my main machines,
so I would go for linux. Did some research, found I could use Debian or
.... errr not !

I don't have a SCSI cdrom and couldn't figure out how to remove the lid.
I undid screws and shook things, nothing happened so I put them back in
:-)

So I downloaded the Debian install tftpboot image, and after some poking
around and swearing got it to boot from the server. It was a typical
Unix fight, but I won the war. It took a while :-)

I shutdown solaris (got a boot prompt) took a wild guess from my limited
experience with suns (sun3s years ago before they hit my skip !) and
type 'net boot' or was it 'boot net' - you get the idea.

And bingo - one Debian installer :-) It even looked good !

I opted to re-partition, created a / partition (most of the disk) and
swap (what was left).

It installed the base image, so far so good. Then it asked what type of
machine I wanted - I said a 'desktop'

It downloaded for a few hours and all was great. The net connection
wasn't fantastic and it had to re-try a few things, but it all looked
good in the end.

Reboot ... one base linux install. With lots ... of .... nothing ....

No X - no X utils ?  Ho hum ..... It did have ssh so logged in from my
main machine and did apt-get install synaptic - and started the dumb man
install utility !

Got X and kernel source for the kernel version it was running.

Then the fun starts !!!!!

X is configured for god knows what, it wont start :-[    Doesn't matter
what I try I cant get bastard thing to go into graphics mode. Much
poking around with google on my main machine I find I should use
xf86configure - it runs ! My problems are solved - NOT !

What a complete sack of shit that was, I wasted a good hour creating
XF86Config files that don't work- time to read some stuff on Xfree86.org

40 mins later I find I can do 'XFree86 -configure' or something similar.
Again this does something ! But nothing good :-(

Lots of reading later I find I need the sunffb device or something ..
xf86config didn't even offer this !

I now have a graphics screen :-)   Yea ... i'm done !.... nope !

Keyboard doesn't work .. all the scan codes are wrong.

Another hours google hacking later I have 9 lines - 9 F**** lines (its
keyboard, how much configuration does a keyboard need) added to
XF86Config.

I now have keys ! Yippe !!! Just not the correct keys :-( Almost, but
not quite.

I take a wild guess at the config and end up with keyboard setup that
works and mouse that works. Ra ! Ra ! Ra !

Time to play X - xdm (gdm or whatever) works. I login

I apt-get some stuff.... no sound ... no video playback :-(

I compile a kernel or 10... I could write a 1000 lines on how this
didn't work, but a brief summary is I could get a kernel that worked,
but ethernet didnt behave and dhcpd didnt work with it. 

I gave up and found a pre-compiled ultra kernel from apt, installed it.
Mostly works, no smbmount support :-( but its a good one.

I then install my favourite bits (pan,evolution etc). The apt versions
are looking very old, I assume the kde/gnome libs aren't very new and
porting is a problem.

Making sound work was another 3 hours of reading, compiling modules, and
configuring bits. Mostly because I cant find a nice simple document to
tell us new to sun people what we need. Got it working in the end, but
all in all it was much more of a fight than I expected, it doesn't
compare well with my experience of linux on Intel.
**** End rant ! :-)

That said now its configured its ok - seems to work well :-)

Not being a Debian user before now I have no idea who maintains the apt
archive, do they need help porting or is it just a slow process to
update?

Jon