[OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

[Jacob Ritorto]

Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes.  Is there X
support?  That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port.  (Trying
to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an emulated
tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl.
OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great, but
I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format.  This is heck-of
retro :)

thx
jake


On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 2:22 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com>
wrote:

> >   Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
> > machine?  I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
> >
> > SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
> > Memory size: 256 Megabytes
> >
>
> That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
> (any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.
>
> You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.
>
> http://www.opensxce.org/
> http://www.tribblix.org/download.html
>
> Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
> honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
> of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
> text iso.
>
> The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
> small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
> iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
> you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
> know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
> but it's likely to be pretty similar.)
>
> This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
> ends up being pretty large because it has support for
> everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
> produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
> One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
> configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
> improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
> agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
> for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
> hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
> I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
> but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)
>
> Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
> a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.
>
> In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
> of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
> illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.
>
> --
> -Peter Tribble
> http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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