[luau] Re: sparc linux and then some

[Dustin Cross]

Aloha,

Actually dual booting a sparc is pretty easy, especially with two drives.
Install solaris on one drive (ie from OK prom 'boot cdrom' and when you get
to selecting the hard drives only use c0t0d3s0).  If you install Solaris on
the default disk (c0t0d3s0) then at the OK prom to boot Solaris type 'boot
disk' or 'setenv boot-device disk' to make the system automatically boot to
Solaris.  Solaris will install on any disk without complaints and you can
change the device aliases at the OK prom so that 'disk' is equal to
something other than c0t0d3s0 or you could add a new alias called solaris
that points to c0t0d3s0 and then do a 'boot solaris'.

Now get back to the OK prom and 'boot cdrom' to the linux install cd.
install linux on the second harddrive (maybe c0t0d1s0) and then to boot
linux, at the OK prom type 'boot disk1' or 'setenv boot-device disk1' to
make the system automatically boot to Linux.  To make the system stop at
the OK prom everytime so you don't have to 'stop-A', at the OK prom
do 'setenv auto-boot? false" and everytime you start the system it will
stop at the OK prom and wait for you to tell it what to do.  To make it
start all the way up to the set boot-device do 'setenv auto-boot? true'.
To look at all your prom settings do 'printenv' and you can change any of
those settings by 'setenv <setting name> <value>'.

If you only had on harddrive and installed solaris on c0t0d3s0 (s0 is slice
0 or partition 1), make c0t0d3s1 swap, c0t0d3s2 is the whole disk, and then
installed Linux on c0t0d3s3 (partition 4) you could boot between Solaris
and Linux by doing 'boot disk' or 'boot disk:3'

Hopefully that makes sense and I haven't screwed anything up.  Incase you
didn't know, on sun4m hardware like your sparc5 scsi id 3 or c0t0d3s0 is
what it used as the default disk and scsi id 6 or c0t0d6s0 is what they
default the cdrom to.

Linux on sun hardware is nice.  SuSE linux is really the only linux that is
up-to-date for sun hardware, but there are several other distros that
work.  I prefer OpenBSD (www.openbsd.org) on old sun hardware.  It is
secure, small, and has everything you need for a server and more.  I use a
sparc5 with OpenBSD as my firewall/router/NAT and it is great.  It used to
also be a webserver, but disk space became a problem.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Dusty


> I am a lurker on the luau list who has just come into posession of an
> old  sparc 5.  I am using it to play with a copy of solaris to learn
> some new  tools while I am looking for a job (just moved back to
> mainland from hawaii,  don't ask why, wasn't thinking straight I
> guess).  I have 2 hard drives in  the system and was wondering if you
> have ever made a dual boot between  solaris and linux??? - some friend
> were wanting to get together and having  linux on the box would be a
> wonderful thing - I tried some simple searching  and haven't found
> anything yet - any help will be greatly appreciated.
>
> tia
> M
>
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