Install linux on sparc

[HebbeLille]

Hi,

I need (want) to install linux on a Sparcstation, which "luckily" doesn't have floppy or cdrom. It does have an ethernet card, so if I just knew HOW it should be possible

What I would like to ask you guyz is: Do you know of a good/stable distribution I can use, and do you know HOW I perform this installation?

How I picture this is to somehow tell the Sparc that I want it to boot from one of my other hosts on the LAN, but I don't know how to do this.

Any help is highly appreciated

--xx--

 

[kd4pba]

Man this is a good question!
I have a Sparc 5 that does have a floppy and CDROM So I was able to go the obvious route.

As far as Distro's go, I am using the somewhat outdated RedHat Version which is 6.2 Zoot. It not bloated, and it is stable. It is however outdated , KDE 1 and so on. Suse has some more up to date Distro's for Sparc, but its on Several CD's as apposed to 1 cd for Redhat.

Check out

http://www.linuxiso.org,

Select By platform, Sparc.

As far as loading across the network, I have yet to do this without makeing the network Boot disk. I think you can stil do this though. Since you asked, I think I am going to try doing it myself just for fun.

The Sparc Should allow you to change it so you can boot from network. I think you would have to do is first download the images. Then Save them on your server somewhere. Then you would need to have it setup so that you could have the boot images unpacked and avalible on the server , what you would be doing is kinda like a diskless client at this point. That raises the question, do you want to install readhat on the hard drive in the sparc box, or do you want to run it as a diskless client? In my case I think would want to run as a diskless client. That way you use the resources of the server and not the sparc box.
However, if you are intent on having Linux Loaded on the hard drive of the Sparc box, then you would need to tell your sparc to boot from the server, then, the files that you boot from would need to do an NFS or network install from the server itself. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think this is actually possible.

This sounds like an intresting project. You may be a lot more happy with the diskless client. I can pass some info to ya on that, I do know it works, I have done it.

How much have you played with the sparc box and what are the specs on what you have, IE memory, HD capacity, CPU speed and so on?

Chris

 

[danielhozac]

If your network card and your motherboard supports PXE boot, you should be able to setup a PXE server on one of your other boxes, allowing it to boot from there. //Daniel