I tried Mandrake 7.1 beta for sparc today. Regretably, this just didn't
work. I tried installing on my Sparc LX (72 MB o'ram, plenty of disk).
I was unable to use the CD, so I resorted to floppies and network booting.
I ran into a few problems...
1) The floppies don't seem to work. Booting the network.img & hd.img disks
(didn't try cdrom.img) shows an error in silo.conf (line 8). None of
the images on the floppies were valid because of this error. No booting.
2) The tftprd.img (network booting) doesn't have a large enough ramdisk.
It boots (yay!), downloads the second stage ramdisk, but runs out of
space when decompressing the ramdisk. This can be fixed by doing
"boot net ramdisk_size=48000" at the PROM's OK prompt. I haven't looked
into what the minimum requirement is for this to work. 48000 is
overkill.
3) The tftprd.img can't use NFS. For some reason it is unable to modprobe
nfs.o after booting. I have no idea why.
After using tftpd.img and specifying a bigger ramdisk things booted & I got
the installer. This led me to another problem:
4) The LX's SCSI controller (an ESP) isn't supported. There's no support
in the kernel and no module available. This is a bit of an issue, since
it's the only disk controller the thing can have. Building ESP support
into the kernel, or including it as a module (like pluto or qlogicpti)
should fix this.
I just happen to have a few spare sun4m machines lying around, so as I have
time in the next few days I plan on fixing things, at least for my own use.
If anyone on the list has experienced similar problems, or is in a position
to correct these issues and post updates iso or floppy images, help would be
appreciated. I'd really like to get Mandrake running on these things.
--
Mike "No .sig for you" Shuey
