The Sun is Up!
OK. I only have 48 MB of RAM in the SPARCstation. So, the copy of Solaris 8 is out (it needs 64! MB) So, I downloaded a bootable image for Gentoo Linux/SPARC from Gentoo and installed it. It took just this side of forever to build the Kernel, but it worked.
The only place where the documentation threw me was in the setup of /etc/fstab. For whatever reason, even though it explicitly says “your system might not look like this” I went and put a line in for /dev/sda3 (in Sun world, the system requires that the entire disk be mapped to the third partition. No, I don’t know why) to mount as ‘/’. This is a Bad Thing. I was able to correct it by booting the CD, but still, I felt pretty silly. Anyhow, the system is now booting from its own hard drive, and I am installing X. Have been since last night.
Anyhow, the distro has some interesting features. They have their own package installer called ‘emerge’, and it is capable of using a local store, or downloading packages over the net as needed. It downloads, unpacks, builds, and installs the packages. Pretty cool.
So, if/when I get X started, I’ll report back. Oh, and even though it doesn’t specify it, the 2.4 kernel does have drivers for the LX’s DBRI sound chip in the ‘Experimental’ section. They initialize the audio, so I think they might work. I’ll install ALSA next and let you know.