After many attempts at trying to disable Sun KB & mouse support in the Debian-supplied 2.4.27 source, nothing worked. First of all, with kernel 2.4.27, there are no options for Sun KB & mouse support listed in xconfig. One has to manually edit .config to change these settings.
Even after manually editing .config, I found that my settings were put back to monolithic support for the Sun KB & mouse, presumably by the file (srcroot)/arch/sparc64/config.in which has some lines like "define_boolean CONFIG_SUN_KEYBOARD=y" etc. etc.. I changed these to "define_tristate CONFIG_SUN_KEYBOARD=m" etc. etc., and the compile failed exactly when looking for a routine called "handle_keyboard_event" or something similar. So apparently, the sparc64 port of the 2.4.27 kernel does NOT like to have Sun KB & mouse support disabled. I then downloaded the 2.6.8 kernel source from Debian, and lo and behold! Sun KB & mouse support are configurable from xconfig (kconfig). So I compiled up a lean, mean 2.6.8 kernel with Sun KB & mouse support as modules. The compile went fine, but now I have a new problem, as explained in my new post, "Cannot boot 2.6.8 kernel from ext3 root partition on Ultra5" (http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2004/12/msg00174.html) > Disable support for the sun keyboard or build it as a module but don't > load it. BTW, Is there a way I can add something to, e.g., modules.conf (or one of the manual tweak files since modules.conf is auto-generated) in order to tell the kernel, "never load the Sun keyboard module, even if you find a Sun keyboard attached"? Thanks again. -Dan