Hello,

I just installed Debian SID on a Sparc Ultra-30. Thanks to everyone who
makes this unsupported port continue to work!

My Ultra 30 has 1.5 GB memory and runs at 296 MHz. Several years ago, I installed Debian 7.8 on this system, and it works pretty well, except
for web browser options. At the time, it looks like I made a mistake by installing SILO (1.4.14) on /dev/sda1 along with Debian 7.8:

root@ultra-30:/# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 136.73 GiB, 146815737856 bytes, 286749488 sectors
Disk model: ST3146807LC
Geometry: 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17849 cylinders
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 =
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: sun

Device Start End Sectors Size Id Type Flags
/dev/sda1 0 15631244 15631245 7.5G 1 Boot
/dev/sda2 15631245 31262489 15631245 7.5G 83 Linux native
/dev/sda3 0 286744184 286744185 136.7G 5 Whole disk
/dev/sda4 31262490 62508914 31246425 14.9G 83 Linux native
/dev/sda5 62508915 66412709 3903795 1.9G 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda6 66412710 286744184 220331475 105.1G 83 Linux native

I'm using sda1 for Debian 7.8, sda2 for Debian SID, and (eventually)
sda4 for Gentoo; sda3 is not used.

My first question is, on Sparc systems, should the "Boot" partition be
just large enough for GRUB? Should it be mounted as "/boot"? What I
have works, but it forces continued use of SILO (and keeping /boot on
sda1). I'm guessing if sda1 were a small Boot partition, I could
install GRUB there from Debian SID and still boot Debian 7.8, Debian
SID, and Gentoo.

Other questions I have are minor:

1) I'm using sysvinit-core instead of systemd, but it appears that all
of the compiled desktop environments (even xfce4 and xinit) depend on
systemd. Are there any desktop environment options for use with sysvinit?

2) When the system boots, apparently before the console and keyboard are
set up, the font on the console is very large. This is minor, except
that I might miss some messages during boot. Is there a Linux command
line (or other) option to configure the console text size and font?

3) Using the Sparc keyboard with the console, the first three characters
I hit seem to be buffered and not immediately displayed, then everything
works as expected. For example, if I log in as root, I don't see
anything entering "roo", then "root" is displayed when I type the "t".
This seems to happen only once, and it's also minor. I tried running
agetty instead of getty on the console with the same result.

thanks again!

-Stan Johnson

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Hi!

On 10/22/20 6:04 PM, Stan Johnson wrote:

I just installed Debian SID on a Sparc Ultra-30. Thanks to everyone who makes this unsupported port continue to work!

Nice and you're welcome.

My first question is, on Sparc systems, should the "Boot" partition be
just large enough for GRUB? Should it be mounted as "/boot"? What I
have works, but it forces continued use of SILO (and keeping /boot on
sda1). I'm guessing if sda1 were a small Boot partition, I could
install GRUB there from Debian SID and still boot Debian 7.8, Debian
SID, and Gentoo.

You will need a boot partition large enough to hold at least GRUB, the kernel and the initrd can be located on a different partition. But normally you
will have /boot large enough to provide space for GRUB, the kernel and
the initrd.

On newer SPARC systems (T4 and newer), a /boot partition is no longer required and therefore not set up by debian-installer by default.

On older systems, it's always recommended to use a separate /boot partition due to the fact that GRUB (and SILO) will use block lists to locate both the kernel and the initrd and therefore circumventing the filesystem completely.

Other questions I have are minor:

1) I'm using sysvinit-core instead of systemd, but it appears that all
of the compiled desktop environments (even xfce4 and xinit) depend on systemd. Are there any desktop environment options for use with sysvinit?

As far as I know, you can still use XFCE4 without systemd. systemd support is enabled with runtime detection only and normally involves a replacement for systemd-logind only. But I'm not really an expert on this topic as I use systemd
on all my machines, even on old Amiga hardware.

2) When the system boots, apparently before the console and keyboard are
set up, the font on the console is very large. This is minor, except
that I might miss some messages during boot. Is there a Linux command
line (or other) option to configure the console text size and font?

Depends on the console driver you are using. Which console driver are you seeing loaded in the bootup messages? Sorry for asking, I'm using a serial console all the time and all my active SPARCs are servers without a frame- buffer.

3) Using the Sparc keyboard with the console, the first three characters
I hit seem to be buffered and not immediately displayed, then everything works as expected. For example, if I log in as root, I don't see
anything entering "roo", then "root" is displayed when I type the "t".
This seems to happen only once, and it's also minor. I tried running
agetty instead of getty on the console with the same result.

I haven't observed this issue but again, I'm not using a framebuffer on
SPARC.

Adrian

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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On 10/24/20 1:17 AM, Connor McLaughlan wrote:

While i really appreciate the effort to keep this port around, i found
it a few inches away to really be usable as a reliable desktop system.
For server software without framebuffer, it might work well, but most
desktop programs aside from the basic desktop environment like lxde or
mate will bus error/segfault or be not installable due to not
available dependencies.

If you run into issue like reproducible crashes, please report them, CC'ing this mailing list. We can only fix issues that people are reporting (unsurprisingly ;)).

You can go and fake a few packages to get stuff running and also use snapshot.debian.org to install dependencies and eventually get a
firefox 50 running.

Well, the main problem is that Mozilla upstream has added a hard dependency
on NodeJS for building Firefox even though it is not strictly necessary.

And NodeJS has very limited platform support as it's based on a Google
product.

I guess the main problem is the vanishing userbase of sparc, and it
feels like each distribution has only one member left to look out for
the port. Not many people test and report bugs it seems. And possibly
there is also less interest in fixing them upstream.

No, the main problem are the lack of reports.

For now i am dualbooting (plugging harddrives) between netbsd and
linux on my sparc machines. While i found the linux kernel is more
stable, sometimes debian seems to corrupt the filesystem and needs a reinstall.

The servers building the packages are running 24/7 without corrupting
their filesystems, so you might have issues with your hardware.

Adrian

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 6:31 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

3) Using the Sparc keyboard with the console, the first three characters
I hit seem to be buffered and not immediately displayed, then everything works as expected. For example, if I log in as root, I don't see
anything entering "roo", then "root" is displayed when I type the "t".
This seems to happen only once, and it's also minor. I tried running agetty instead of getty on the console with the same result.

I haven't observed this issue but again, I'm not using a framebuffer on SPARC.

I can confirm this behavior on a Sun Blade 100 and Ultra 25, but like
you, it is neglectable to me, compared with the other issues on sparc.

While i really appreciate the effort to keep this port around, i found
it a few inches away to really be usable as a reliable desktop system.
For server software without framebuffer, it might work well, but most
desktop programs aside from the basic desktop environment like lxde or
mate will bus error/segfault or be not installable due to not
available dependencies.

You can go and fake a few packages to get stuff running and also use snapshot.debian.org to install dependencies and eventually get a
firefox 50 running.
To add options, you can use third party software kits like pkgsrc of
netbsd to successfully build and run quite many packages on debian
that error out or are uninstallable in their debian provided version.

I guess the main problem is the vanishing userbase of sparc, and it
feels like each distribution has only one member left to look out for
the port. Not many people test and report bugs it seems. And possibly
there is also less interest in fixing them upstream.

For now i am dualbooting (plugging harddrives) between netbsd and
linux on my sparc machines. While i found the linux kernel is more
stable, sometimes debian seems to corrupt the filesystem and needs a
reinstall. And on the other side, the netbsd kernel is more unpolished
and will crash from time to time, but the system has a little more
software running and a firefox 52, which is still bad. but as recent
as possible for now.

Regards,
Connor

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