Hi,
I recently acquired an old Sun Fire V215, which I intend to use for
Debian experimentation.
Found a minor oddity in the current Debian installer.
During GRUB installation, it presents the standard message:
It seems that this computer is configured to boot via EFI, but maybe
that configuration will not work for booting from the hard drive.
Some EFI firmware implementations do not meet the EFI specification
(i.e. they are buggy!) and do not support proper configuration of
boot options from system hard drives.
That doesn't make much sense with grub-iee1275 and OBP, it should
probably be removed in this configuration.
I also found that the installer had trouble setting up the apt sources
later in the installation process, and only the "standard utilities"
task was available. sudo and SSH were missing afterwards, requiring
manual fixing through rescue mode.
It looks like this was the root of the problem:
The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG B523E5F3FC4E5F2C
Debian Port: NO_PUBKEY 8D69674688B6CB36 be verified because the
public key is not available:
debian-ports-archive-keyring 2022.02.15 was installed from the CD, but I
can see that there's a newer version available (2023.02.01). After
installing this package manually, apt started working again.
I also found that the smp kernel is very unstable on this box, had
kernel panics all over the place. What exactly is the deal here? Why
would the SMP kernel (or the whole system on multiple CPUs) be so much
less stable? Could it be a hardware defect?
In any case, I've got a working machine now.
kudos,
Gregor
