Hi Gregor, On Mon, 2025-10-13 at 13:39 +0200, Gregor Riepl wrote: > Some good news for once: > > I finally had some time to reinstall my Ultra 10 using the install iso that > you > provided a few years ago. Not everything went smooth, but I didn't encounter > any > major issues, and I'm (gently) stress-testing the machine now.
Which one? > What went well: > - The installer booted without issue > - The installation was generally smooth with only a few hiccups > - The machine booted the new system on the first attempt, and multiple times > after > - The kernel is up to date: 6.16.11+deb14-sparc64 > - I haven't seen any of the kernel panics and oopses that plague my Fire > V215. These > must be specific problems of the smp kernel (and SMP SPARCs). The Ultra 10 is > single-core. The next stable kernel updates for 6.16.x will contain a lof of SPARC-specific fixes which should make the kernel on all models substantially more stable. > What didn't: > - The HDD is making bad seeking noises while Linux is booting, but no > messages in the > kernel log, and SMART tests show no errors. It's also very quiet during > normal operation. > Might need to find a replacement IDE drive still. > - The installer had an outdated debian-ports-archive-keyring and refused to > process data from > the ports archive until I manually downloaded and installed the current > version before proceeding > with the installation. Which is perfectly normal when using old installation images. > - After first boot, I couldn't install any packages because start-stop-daemon > was missing (see below) > > This is what I got from dpkg: > > Fetched 44.6 kB in 1s (82.9 kB/s) > Reading changelogs... Done > dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable > dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable > Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin > Error: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) > > /usr/sbin/start-stop-daemon was indeed missing, despite the current version > of dpkg being installed. > After creating a dummy shell script and reinstalling dpkg, everything was > fine again. Yes, that is also a problem that is not present in current images. > I haven't tested Xorg yet, but I suspect it will work ok with the built-in > Rage 128. > I'll test the Creator (sunffb) at a later point, when I'm happy with > stability. IIRC there was some recent > effort to fix the driver and make it usable again. My ancient effort[1] made > the driver compile and load, > but the UI was frozen at the login screen. OK. FWIW, I will build new installation images once the SPARC kernel fixes have found their official way into Debian which should be in a few days when Linux 6.16.13 is released. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
