[OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

[Jacob Ritorto]

tribblix dies a few seconds after starting to boot with
Loading: /platform/SUNW,Ultra-5_10/boot_archive
Loading: /platform/sun4u/boot_archive

Can't open boot_archive
Fast Data Access MMU Miss


Bummer.

Thanks very much, nonetheless, for keeping SPARC in mind, Peter!



On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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>> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>>
>
>