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
