Installing Gentoo and Solaris on a Sun Blade 100 (05.Mar.2010)
!!!UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!
Introduction
I just bought a Sun Blade 100: Ultrasparc IIe CPU (Sparc64 v9 architecture) with 512MB RAM and 2 HDD (60GB and 20GB).
My target is to install on it both Solaris 10 and Linux and I am writing here my experiencies as I suppose that it won't be an easy peasy thing.
I devided the whole thing into two separate categories as I think that there will be a lot to write, but on this page I mention the basic tests/attempts before starting the "serious" installations.
So, here we go.
First boot from cdrom
The first thing I wanted to do was to download a Gentoo Linux image and see if I was able to boot with it.
I therefore downloaded and burned the "Minimal CD 2008.0" for the "Sparc" architecture. The image contains a 2.6.24 kernel.
The first attempt to boot with it failed - of course ;o)
At the "ok" prompt (press "Stop + a" if your workstation doesn't want to stop on its own at the "ok"-prompt) I gave the command "boot cdrom" to run the bootloader of the CD, and afterwards "gentoo" (the default kernel of 2008.0), which resulted in the screen getting blank during the boot process.
I solved this by invoking BEFORE saying "boot cdrom" the command "setenv output-device screen:r1024x768x60" COMBINED afterwards with "reset-all" (only the first time after executing the previous command - that setting is then somehow saved in the PROM of the PC) and "gentoo video=atyfb:off" OR "video=atyfb:1024x768@60".
At this point the screen at least was showing me when the workstation was getting stuck, which varied between when reaching during the boot process the point of "Loading firmware" or "Letting udev process events" or "hda" during the boot process.
I did a lot of attempts and the one that finally worked was "gentoo video=atyfb:1024x768@60 nodma ide=nodma"
In my case it's the parameter "ide=nodma" which makes the difference, but depending on your distribution the "nodma" option might make the difference, so you can use them both at least for the first time just to see if things work.
After the successful boot I partitioned (partitions looked somehow funny - e.g. "hdc1p1" instead of the usual "hdc1") and formatted both HDD to see if things were really working - no problems here.
Change CDROM
The first obstacle was that the image of Solaris 10 was available only as DVD-image with a size of ~2.4GB.
As the Blade 100 had only a CD-ROM, I had to swap it with an old DVD-ROM.
After doing it I was still able to boot the Gentoo CD :o)
Change HDD
A 20GB HDD is quite depressing, isn't it?
Well, I couldn't resist to swap it with an old 160GB PATA I had (I set the pins to "cable select").
After booting and partitioning the HDD I saw that the partitions on the "new" HDD looked like normal ones (e.g. "hdc1") and not anymore like the weird ones I had on the original HDD (e.g. "hdc1p0" - even after deleting everything and creating brand new partitions).
I interpreted this as "don't install Solaris on the new HDD" and made sure that the old HDD (the 60GB one - the one which showed in fdisk the partitions like "hdc0p0") was the first one (which results in "hda0p0") by swapping them in the case.
I rebooted (still using the Gentoo CD) and everything looked normal.
Solaris & Linux installation
Well, the questions I had were:
- shall I install Linux on the first or second HDD?
- is it better to use Grub (Linux) or Silo (Solaris) to load the "other" OS?
I know that Silo is quite flexible and that it's able to read EXT3-partitions (Linux), while I wasn't sure if Grub is able to read ZFS-partitions, so I opted for the variant to have Solaris on the 1st HDD and to configure Silo on a later stage to boot Linux from the 2nd HDD.
So, here we go: