[lug] Linux on a Sun Blade 1000

[William D. Knoche]

I would be happy to help out with anything Sun releated.
Unfortunately I have to be in the Bay area all next week and won't have 
much availability even for email.
I no longer have a SB1000 at home and I just recycled the lab sb1000 as 
well.

I suspect the CD may not have had the proper boot/loader image.
The CD/DVD drive is a standard drive, nothing unusual but it is an older 
drive so may have some trouble with discs written on newer higher speed 
drives.

Make sure you do,

ok> setenv boot-device cdrom disk net

Power off.
Then try,
ok> boot cdrom.

The error message, "Fast MMU Miss", (which should actually be "Fast Data 
Access MMU miss") is reported for a number of linux distros (debian, 
gentoo, etc) on Sparc.
Folks report that a net install always works. Seems to be a bug in the 
bootloader/installer (Silo) and/or the ramdisk.
Check out the current state, http://silo.auxio.org

Its been awhile since I last looked at this issue and don't know the 
current state of things.

My recommendation is to net install. It seems to be the quickest and 
easiest path to happiness.

--bill

-- 
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 07:32, Walter Pienciak
<wpiencia at thunderdome.ieee.org> wrote:

> > Hi,
> >
> > I am looking to throw Linux onto an old Sun Blade 1000
> > (UltraSPARC III processors).  I tried booting from a CD with
> > ubuntu-9.10-server-sparc.iso, but got the "Fast MMU Miss" error
> > and the Openboot prompt.
> >
> > Anyone running a decently modern distro on such hardware, or know
> > which distro might be best for maintaining support for that
> > platform?
>   
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William D. Knoche                               Bill.Knoche at Sun.COM
I/O Technologies                        Voice:  303-223-4848
Market Development			Fax:    303-223-4848
Sun Microsystems, Inc.			
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