This file contains some helpful information if you are having trouble booting Linux on your SPARC system. SUPPORTED BOOT METHODS: Floppy Network CD-ROM * Booting the Floppy Disk Images This method is being supported so that users without a CD burner can easily boot and install Splack. Pick the boot disk image appropriate for your system and write that out to a floppy using RAWRITE or dd. The README file contains more information regarding this. There are two root disk images, color1.gz and color2.dsk. Write these out to seperate floppies. When the kernel boots and asks for the ramdisk floppy, give it color1.gz. That will load and then ask for color2.dsk. From this point, you can login as root and prepare your hard disk and start installing Splack. NOTE: Floppy installation is not supported, only booting. So you will still need to have the Splack distribution available via NFS, a CD-ROM, or an existing hard disk partition. For NFS users, you'll also need the network supplemental disk. Be sure to have a look at the README file for more information. * Booting the CD-ROM This is probably the easiest method. The ISO9660 image for Splack is setup to detect your architecture and then load the correct kernel. Save yourself some time and just use the prebuilt ISO images. Burn the disc and then pop it in your drive. Boot it by typing "boot cdrom" at the ok prompt. Hit Stop-A (also called L1-A) to get to the ok prompt. If your CD-ROM was not standard on your Sun, you may have to actually specify the device to boot ("cdrom" is an alias in the PROM to SCSI device ID 6). It's easy enough. See the OPENBOOT.TXT file for some help using the OpenBoot PROM on your Sun. NOTE: If you are using an older Sun system, specifically a sun4c system, you should burn your disc at 2x. Most of the CD-ROM drives on sun4c systems have trouble reading CD-R discs that were recorded at speeds higher than 2x. * Booting over the Network This will also involve either a CD-ROM containing the actual Splack packages or an NFS export from your main file server. The booting step is done using TFTP. I will explain how to set that up on a Splack machine below. First, the easy way: (1) Take the Splack CD to an installed Linux box (the tftpconfig script hasn't been modified to work on other operating systems). One that will serve as our boot server. Mount the CD there. (2) Change to /images on the CD and run "./tftpconfig". Follow the instructions. (3) Done! The hard way: (1) Enable the in.tftpd server. Edit /etc/inetd.conf and uncomment the "tftp" line. Save and quit the editor. (2) Load the RARP kernel module: /sbin/modprobe rarp This module is in the modules.tgz package on the Intel platform, so make sure you've installed that. If you rebuilt your kernel, make sure you built RARP support either into the kernel or as a module. (3) Populate the RARP table with the information for your Sun machine. All you need is the MAC address of the Sun (displayed when you turn it on) and the IP address you want to assign it. Here's an example. Suppose I have an system with a MAC address of 08:00:20:C0:4C:51 and I want it to have an IP address of 192.168.1.14. I need to run these commands on my boot server: /sbin/rarp -s 192.168.1.14 08:00:20:C0:4C:51 /sbin/arp -s 192.168.1.14 08:00:20:C0:4C:51 (4) Make the /tftpboot directory. This is where we will place the boot image that the server will pass along to the SPARC. (5) Select the tftp image for your system from the /tftpboot directory. The README file there will explain the available images. For my example, I am using the tftp-sun4u.img file. (6) Get the hexidecimal representation of the IP address you will have the Sun system using. You can use something like the following awk script: $ awk -v IP=$IPADDR 'BEGIN{split(IP,a,".");printf("%02X%02X%02X%02X\n",a[1],a[2],a[3],a[4])}' And then you will get something like "C0A8010E". (7) Copy the tftp image you select to /tftpboot/. So my example, I'd do: cp tftp-sun4u.img /tftpboot/C0A8010E If you have a sun4c/d/m system, then you will need to add ".SUN4x" to the end of the filename in /tftpboot, where "x" is C, D, or M for the architechture you have. For example, the proper filename for a SPARCstation 5 would be: /tftpboot/C0A8010E.SUN4M UltraSPARC (sun4u) systems do not need the ".SUN4x" extension on the boot file. (8) Send SIGHUP to inetd by typing "killall -HUP inetd". With those easy steps out of the way, you can move over to the Sun and fire it up. Drop to the PROM ok prompt and type "boot net". MACHINES KNOWN TO BOOT AND RUN SPLACK: The following is a list of machines that have been verified to successfully boot, install, and run (by 'run' I mean login and do normal userland stuff) Splack. If you are using a machine that isn't on this list and can verify that Splack works on it, send me an email so I can get it added. sun4c: - Sun SPARCstation IPC - Sun SPARCstation 2 sun4m: - Sun SPARCstation 4 - Sun SPARCstation 5 - Sun SPARCstation 10 (TMS390 CPU) - Sun SPARCstation 20 sun4u: - Sun Ultra 1/170E - Sun Ultra 2 - Sun Ultra 5 (Model 360) - Sun Ultra 10 - Sun Ultra 60 (single and dual CPU models) - Sun Ultra Enterprise 1 Good luck! -- Alvaro Figueroa fede2@fuerzag.ulatina.ac.cr