Michael Clark wrote:
I have just received an old Sun Sparc IPX. I am able to boot it and it gets stuck looking for the network connection and nameserver. I have connected an old scsi cdrom, and put in my SuSE boot disk, but it will only look at the hard drive for booting.
I have a few questions
First, how do I boot a cdrom or floppy??
How can I install SuSE Linux on it??
Do I have to compile a kernel on an intel based machine to boot the sparc??
Is there a BIOS or CMOS on the sparc that I could modify??
I'm lost.
o am I. :-) A sun sparc has -IMHO- another type of CPU, sparc CPU or whatever, they usually do not have x86's. So Sparc Linux is a very special thing and this might be the wrong list. There is (in germany) a SuSE decatlon distribution, that contains a selection of different dists, including one for the sparc. (better check SuSE website!) the sparc usually boots -as far as i remember- from either disk, cd, tape or eaven floppy. There is a small program that comes up at boottime, that allows you to tell the sparc were to boot from. CD-ROM should be .... device 6(?). different from linux, it must be a specific id number. I had to alter a "datasize" (blocksize) switch to make it work on our antique sparc. (Still running an antique sun-os from a 200 MB HD, 12 MB RAM, X11R5 taken from an antique gnu dist. for sun-os) I thought of "converting" this machine to linux, because nobody realy needs it or wants to support it at work and as time goes by it is more and more senseless to upgrade it in any way) I have been following some infos on linux for sparc, but what I remember sounds not much encouraging. More luck with DEC's Alpha. I once tried cross-compiling (gcc) for AIX, but I failed on that. After all I do not know wether it is _realy_ possible to create bin's for other platforms on intel machines. I am not the refference for that anyway. ;-( cheers Juergen -- ========================================== __ _ Jürgen Braukmann e-mail: brauki@cww.de | / / (_)__ __ ____ __ Tel: 0201-743648 dk4jb@db0qs.#nrw.deu.eu | / /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ========================================== /____/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e