> Thanks all.
>
> Looks like we'll see if we can do a BSD install. Biggest problem so
> far seems to be the 'virgin' drive. Gotta find a floppy disk sized
> formatter for it.
>
> Still open to suggestion!
>
> Jim
I just thought of something that will make the install a lot easier if
you've got an existing UNIX box, a CD-burner, and a CD-ROM that does
512-byte blocks. I used this to make a bootable CD-ROM for my SparcBook 3GS
(I toasted the Solaris 2.5.1 that was on it by installing Sun's Y2K
patches).
I used the following proceedure on my Sparc 20/712 running Solaris 2.6 and
then copied the resulting image over to my Mac and burned it to CD-R.
Worked great once I figured out how to boot it. Beware, the OpenBSD utility
for setting up your disk is a royal pain.
If you don't have the hardware/software to do this, you can also make a boot
floppy or dd miniroot28.fs (I think that's the right one) to a second HD.
Zane
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc
OpenBSD Bootable Sparc CD-ROM How-To
Many thanks are owed to the authors of mksunbootcd and the NetBSD Bootable
CD-ROM HOWTO. (
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/bootcd.html#sparcimage)
Step 1.
Create an ISO out of the files you wish to include on the CD. The first
disc I made was 79MB and included just the base packages, ports.tar.gz and
some readme files. There is plenty of room to add 150MB of sparc packages,
source tar balls, etc.
mkisofs -o ~/obsd28sparc.iso -T -a -l -J -r -L \
-V "OpenBSD2.8_sparc" /mnt/cdrom/2.8/sparc
Check the man page for mkisofs to see what all the switches do. For me it
was important to select a couple of options so the disc would show up
properly under Win2k; translation tables (-T) for lower case file names
and a volume ID (-V).
In case you're using an OS that doesn't already have mkisofs, it can be
retrieved here:
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/mkisofs/
Step 2.
Retrieve a bootable floppy image of OpenBSD. At the time of this writing I
used
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/2.8/sparc/floppy28.fs.
Step 3.
Compile and install mksunbootcd. This tool will allow you to append a sun
disklabel and OpenBSD boot image to the ISO.
You can find mksunbootcd here:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/mksunbootcd/
Step 4.
Create the final ISO. I used the following command:
mksunbootcd obsd28sparc.iso floppy28.fs floppy28.fs floppy28.fs
If you happen to have different boot images for sun4, sun4c, and sun4m
architectures, you might use a command like this:
mksunbootcd obsd28sparc.iso obsd-sun4.fs obsd-sun4c.fs obsd-sun4m.fs
Be sure not to run this command more than once since it rewrites the ISO
file. Once you have burned the ISO to a CD you should be able to run 'boot
cdrom'. See the current INSTALL.sparc file for equivalent commands with
different OpenBoot versions.
Step 5.
Contribute to the OpenBSD project. Every six months I try to buy at least
one copy of the official CD-ROM and usually go crazy with t-shirt
purchases. See
http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html for more info.
Received on Wed Feb 14 2001 - 15:31:30 GMT