> I found that inserting the rescue floppy, typing "boot > floppy", then "linux root=/dev/sda1" did the trick. How does one set > this as the default so that a rescue floppy is not necessary?
The Sun prom of the UltraSparcs (and I'm wagering Sparc/UltraSparc II/III etc) have a basic environment variable system which determines bootup behaviour. Do "setenv A B" to set a variable and "show env" to see the environment as currently set up (from memory, may have errors). One env variable is which device is considered the boot device. I think "boot-device" which is probably set to some sort of network boot for you. You can activate this choice by typing "boot" only at the "ok" prompt(?). In my case, I set the boot device to "disk:1" -- I think that's the SCSI device #1. Apparently "disk:1:1" is another possible valid syntax, perhaps meaning first partition on SCSI device 1? Now however I set up my Debian system, it works for me to type "boot disk:1" or set "boot-device" to "disk:1" and set auto-booting to true (I'm working from memory here, and my UltraSparc1 has since stopped auto booting [if it ever did] so now I have to manually type "boot disk:1" at the prom prompt again). I would personally be very happy if some Sun guru sort would reply to this message and say: "Uh... you're way off base; it works like THIS:..." because as a Sun newbie, setting up Linux on this box probably took about three hours longer than it should have, if mail archives (Google-able resource of any sort) had contained a basic description of the Sun prom. Hmmm. Odd. First hit on Google for "sun boot prom" gave me this site: http://wks.uts.ohio-state.edu/sysadm_course/html/sysadm-119.html -- in retrospect, I don't think I would've thought to search for "sun boot prom" at the time I was installing. -- Tim Ellis Senior Database Architect Gamet, Inc.
