On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 03:12:28PM +1200, IT Support NZ wrote:
> How was it on Sparc? I have a 1000E server (9 years old or
> thereabouts) with four processors and a huge raid array (25 disks)
> that I was wanting to try linux on at some stage .... any god for
> older models?

Mine's a sparcstation 10 with 122MB RAM, 2x4GB drives, an inbuilt 10mbps
ethernet card. Installation went without a hitch, except for the disk
partitioning. Things to watch:
- the boot disk must have a sun disk label -- fdisk has the facility to
  create this if necessary
- don't use the first partition on any disk for anything that writes to
  the start of the partition (e.g. swap); ext2 is fine
- older PROMs require that the boot partition be less than 1GB. It's
  recommended to have a small (say, 5-10MB) /boot partition at cylinder
  0 on the first disk. Either have your / partition < 1GB or follow the
  advice in http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2000/05/msg00205.html
  (other partitions can be >1GB). If you get a failure trying to make
  the system bootable check your partition sizes.
- I've been consistently unable to create a rescue floppy during the
  install process
- SILO works differently from LILO so RTFM if editing /etc/silo.conf

HTH
Roy.

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