An old Sparcstation 2 has been running Woody since it was installed ca. 2002 by diskette -> network. Recently I've added an external 18 GB drive and am interested to install a newer Debian to it. Can anyone comment _pro_ or _con_ about installing etch or lenny or squeeze on a Sparc 2?
Efforts described below have failed. If a system upgrade is warranted, can anyone suggest how to accomplish it. Thanks, ... p. crawford Notes on extant efforts. (1) debootstrap With the drive connected to an i386 Debian, dbootstrap should be able to cross-install for Sparc. Nevertheless the i386 Squeeze fdisk complains about partitions created by Sparc Woody fdisk and _vice versa_. An untested method is to install debootstrap from an archive into the old Woody system and to attempt to install Sarge or Etch with it. (2) CD installer wodim was never installed in this Woody. I made a CD with i386 Lenny. wodim -v -speed=0 dev=/dev/hdc debian-501-sparc-netinst.iso dmesg on the Sparc reports, Vendor: YAMAHA Model: CRW4260 Rev: 1.0h Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Detected scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0 scsi : detected 1 SCSI cdrom 2 SCSI disks total. sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 6x/6x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray ... but the disk is never mounted. sr0: CDROM not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive. cdrom: open failed. Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive. VFS: Disk change detected on device sr(11,0) (3) Diskette -> netinstall Worked for Woody but diskette images for Etch & etc. are not visible. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live helps you keep up with all your friends, in one place. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9660826 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]

