Subject: Re: SPARCstation boot (Zip) disk
To: Andy Ball <andy.ball@earthlink.net>
From: Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net>
List: port-sparc
Date: 12/22/2002 18:45:23
>Thanks to Michael (ML), der Mouse and Joachim for confirming
>that my SPARCstation is likely to be able to boot from its
>Zip drive.
>
>It's time for me to create a Zip disk that my SPARCstation
>can boot from. Can I use a PC running NetBSD/i386 to produce
>this or am I likely to come up against byte-ordering issues?

i don't recall exactly what problems i had when doing this, but
cross-building for sparc from my i386 laptop is how i got my sparc
going.  the build died at some point most of the way through, but
enough had been done (along with building the generic kernel) that i
was able to netboot the machine, finish the build, write the resulting
install media image to the zip disk (which i had attached to the
sparc), and then boot from it.

>Even if I can't do a proper install this way, I would like
>to at least boot a kernel with a view to testing a 10baseT
>transceiver that arrived yesterday.

tell the machine to boot from the net and use tcpdump to see if it's
emitting any packets.

>I'm also wondering whether to install 1.5.3 or 1.6, so I'd
>welcome people's thoughts or observations.

i'd go with 1.6, given the choice.  i feel it's much better.

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