My not terribly recent experience with Solaris on SPARC was that if there was no Sun keyboard installed, it would automagically use TTYA as the console. Which brings to mind a question, what speed do you have your terminal set for? If it's set to the net5501's default 19200, you might just need to set everything (BIOS and terminal) to 9600 to catch Solaris booting. I wouldn't bet on it being that simple, but certainly worth a try.
-Jed On Dec 2, 2010, at 8:53 PM, Malcolm Herbert wrote: > I'm trying to install Solaris 11 Express on a Soekris net5501 host which > has 256MB of memory and no video card for use as a low-power server[1] - > how do I configure grub to tell the kernel to use the serial port as a > console? > > after some hardware issues, I managed to get a 32bit install of Solaris > 11 Express installed onto a 2.5" SATA drive using my netbook. After > making sure that grub didn't use a graphical splash screen I was able to > hook the HDD up to the net5501 board and boot it. > > The serial console showed the grub screen and was I able to watch it > count down, however when grub handed off to the kernel, there was some > disk activity (around 20-25sec worth) before the host rebooted again ... > all the while without any output to the BIOS video emulator or to the > serial port ... > > This is encouraging - I'm expecting the host to not perform well (if it > does at all) due to the extremely tight memory, but I'd still like to > see where it is choking and see what else the booting kernel discovers > as it comes up, however I'm not sure what to do with grub to get the > appropriate logging messages to the kernel ... has anyone tried to get a > purely serial-only install of Solaris/OpenSolaris working on x86 > hardware? No brainer for SPARC, which is where I'm more familiar ... > > Regards, > Malcolm > > [1] the host I am intending on using does have the minimum required > 512MB but it's in use at the moment > > -- > Malcolm Herbert This brain intentionally > m...@mjch.net left blank > > _______________________________________________ > Soekris-tech mailing list > Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com > http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
