Thanks for the advice. I have determined that the problem was initrd. Using vanilla-sources, I have compiled a initrd-free 2.4.32-r4 kernel using a gentoo tftpboot image (4hrs compile time, 2MB unzipped). This kernel works excellent with debian/unstable and runs really nice on my Quad CPUs.
I have tried to start with woody and slowly 'evolve' my distro with no success. Woody -> sarge, sid or etch; sarge (by itself); ect.. process of elimination =) I have tried all of the available tftpboot and floppy boot images found at http.us.debian.org looking for a solution. This initrd issue also exists with many other distributions that offer binary kernels, so this is not necessarily a debian issue. Even after I compile the initrd.img, my hypersparcs give me spinlocks with "cramfs: bad magic" and so on, and the boot does not complete. NetBSD 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0 also gave me grief. After installing, they would freeze up at a certain point, but I did not try to manually circumvent those issues. There needs to be manual tweaking in order to get any version of debian and it's installer, pre-dating June 1st, 2006. If there is interest, I would be more than happy to further document my testing. Thank-you Shaun -----Original Message----- From: Petr Salinger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 2:36 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: sparc32 problems with libc6 and 2.4 kernel Hi, only hint: You should try to upgrade to sarge version first, not directly to sid version. Petr -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]