Installing Debian SPARC on an Ultra-30 using the 'woody' installer
Note: this documentation is probably pretty out-of-date, since woody is several Debian releases ago.
First, get to the boot loader menu (i.e. BIOS) by using STOP-A. On a Sun keyboard, stop is in the set of function keys (cut, paste, etc.) in the upper left-hand corner.
You can get various pieces of information at this menu. For instance:
net .enet-addr
gives you the MAC address of the ethernet card. See this URL for more information http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/806-2906-10/6jc3f0a9h?a=view .
Apparently, the Ultra-30 can't boot off a CD-ROM (?), or at least the one I have can't boot off the disc I have. Instead, I had to have it boot off the network, via TFTP.
To do this, there are a few things that need to be configured. First install tftpd and rarpd. After tftpd has been installed, modify the tftpd line in /etc/inetd.conf to use /tftpboot rather than /boot.
Download the TFTP boot image referenced in the Debian install guide (see the appendix). Place the install guide in /tftpboot, and make a soft link from it to a "client-ip-in-hex" name, i.e. the client machine's IP address in hex, for instance 192.168.0.103 as C0A80067.
Make sure the client's name is in /etc/hosts, for instance:
192.168.0.103 myhost
Create /etc/ethers containining a mapping from MAC address to DNS name:
08:00:20:8c:c1:7e myhost
Then, to catch changes with /etc/inetd.conf, restart inetd:
/etc/init.d/inetd restart
Then start rarpd as well:
/etc/init.d/rarpd start
At this point, your "server" machine is ready.
On the client machine, get into the BIOS menu with STOP-A, and type boot net. The client will look on the local network for a RARP server, find yours, and then download the image that you put in /tftpboot.
After this, it's pretty much a standard Debian installation.
The only real tricky part was getting X to work, because there's not a lot of documentation about what X server to use. It also took me a while to recall (duh) that I can look at the output of dmesg to see what kind of hardware I have. This Ultra-30 has a Creator 3D card, which uses the sunffb X server that comes with xserver-xfree86. This server only works at a 24-bit depth. I use the kernel framebuffer, a type 5 keyboard with sun/us layout (no variant), mouse at /dev/sunmouse (the mouse plugs into the bottom of the keyboard), and settings for a generic 19-20" monitor, resolutions up to 1280x864. That's when it got tricky. The thing would only boot if I removed DRI from the list of server modules to be loaded, and didn't configure a DRI section in the configuration file.
The machine has an 8 GB disk, so I divided it up this way:
/ 140 MB <swap> 500 MB <special> /tmp 750 MB /var 750 MB /opt 2 GB /usr 1.5 GB /home 3 GB
Note one special thing for Sparc hardware: disk partition 3 must be a special "whole disk" type partition that encompasses the whole disk. You can do what you want otherwise - it doesn't really use any space.