Hi Adrian, Thank you for the rapid answer.
> Yes, the latest image is known to have a broken version of debootstrap. I > should probably remove these images to keep others from using them. Thanks. I tried again with the older image https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/debian-cd/2016-05-04/ 1) At the first attempt, with a default partitioning ('/' partition and swap partition), the installation completed but the installed system could not boot: "Cannot find /etc/silo.conf". The reason appears to be that my hard disk is > 1 GB, and the advice from [1] helped: I could overcome this problem by creating a boot partition at the beginning of the disk (250 MB in my case, and in ext2, to avoid the warning). May I suggest that the Debian installer uses such a partitioning scheme by default? I've seen the Debian 8.6 installer use a separate /boot partition by default on armhf and s390x. So, it shouldn't be easy to do the same thing for sparc...? 2) The installed system now boots, either by entering 1/vmlinuz initrd=/initrd.img root=/dev/sda2 at the SILO prompt, or by letting this prompt timeout. However, the boot process hangs after one minute, after this output: Starting udev Kernel Device Manager... [ OK ] Started udev Kernel Device Manager. [ OK ] Found device /dev/ttyS0. [ 66.121368] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0 [ 66.137222] sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5 [ 66.384970] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810 [ 66.726958] [drm] Found bochs VGA, ID 0xb0c5. [ 66.727424] [drm] Framebuffer size 16384 kB @ 0x1ff01000000, mmio @ 0x1ff02000000. [ 66.773438] [TTM] Zone kernel: Available graphics memory: 248620 kiB [ 66.774061] [TTM] Initializing pool allocator Any idea? Is there a combination of a '-vga' parameter to qemu [2] and some kernel parameters [3] (I tried 'console=ttyS0', 'console=/dev/null', 'nofb', 'nomodeset', 'vga=normal') that would make this work? 3) There's a problem with the network interface: It accepts a configuration through the built-in DHCP server of QEMU, but - as I could see by putting myself in a chroot environment at the end of the installation - an 'ssh me@10.0.2.2' cannot connect to the host machine at 10.0.2.2. DNS lookup doesn't work either, although /etc/resolv.conf contains the correct value 10.0.2.3. On other platforms this works. The hardware emulated by QEMU on this platform is hub 0 \ hub0port1: user.0: index=0,type=user,net=10.0.2.0,restrict=off \ hub0port0: ne2k_pci.0: index=0,type=nic,model=ne2k_pci,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:56 Does anyone happen to know? Bruno [1] http://www.justskins.com/forums/fun-installing-debian-in-219272.html [2] http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html [3] http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt