Installing Gentoo on a Sun Ultra 10 [UltraSPARC, OLD comp]

Zach_the_Lizard · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2008 Posts: 17 Location: /root

I'm trying to install Gentoo on an old Sun Ultra 10 workstation my dad had. It has, IIRC, 128 MB of RAM, a Sun Ultra 2 processor that runs at the blazing speed of 300Mhz, and about a 4 Gb hard drive. Yes, I am a sadomasochist :twisted:

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Well, I plug the computer up, put in the Gentoo CD, tell it to boot off it, and all appears well. However, it will not actually let me log in. When it gets to the point where it is supposed to automatically log in, it flashes text that goes like this:

"livecd: root (automatic login)

Module not found

INIT: c1 respawning too fast; disabled for 5 minutes"

It repeats this several times, for c1 through six. Pressing enter does nothing, and switching to other consoles just displays the same message. Waiting 5 minutes just repeats the process, presumably forever. It does this both with and without video. Having never ever had a problem like this before, I must call upon the vast wealth of knowledge this forums has.

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2605

I would highly discourage you from using the LiveCD to install Gentoo, especially on that machine. I would recommend a minimal installation. You don't have to download a new installation disc though. You can simply pass the nox kernel parameter during the boot process.

Zach_the_Lizard · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2008 Posts: 17 Location: /root

Well, your suggestion didn't work. However, using the 2007.0 CD did work. Apparantly there are some bugs in the 2008 beta 2 cd. Now let's see how long it takes for it to get from stage3 to fluxbox. I won't even try GNOME or KDE. With a total of 4.3 Gb of disk space, of which I've used about .3 GB for swap and /boot, I'm thinking I'm going as light as possible.

Perhaps in a few days, when the dust settles and it probably has finished compiling, I'll come back and post from the Sun machine.

nixnut · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 4:13 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on Sparc.
Better off in here.
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Zach_the_Lizard · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2008 Posts: 17 Location: /root

Well, the Ultra 10 ddin't have enough diskspace to actually get Gentoo installed, so for now it has Debian installed. It does allow me to test out a few things, such as SSH. Until now, I've never used SSH, but have heard that it is useful. Having used it to try and install Gentoo and Debian, I now see its utility. It's really nice for me to be able to run X apps from my computer and have them display on another. It helps get around the fact that that computer is really slow. It's also nice to use SSH to install Gentoo. Nothing beats being able to do whatever while still compiling at full speed.

armin76 · Retired Dev Joined: 24 Apr 2006 Posts: 174

Yeah, that was fixed in the final 2008.0 release.

As for the 4gb space, you sure? Gentoo only needs less than 1gb.

billr · n00b Joined: 13 Jul 2008 Posts: 2

I just did a new install on an Ultra 10 with 4G disk and it works just fine. I partitioned into /, /usr, /var, /home and swap. I used the current 2008.0 universal CD for installation. One thing to watch out for is that with only a 1.8GB /usr partition, you need to create extra inodes or it will run out due to all the little portage files. (The error says no more filespace, but 'df' shows only 48% used. Running 'dumpe2fs' will show all the inodes are used up.) I used:
mk2efs -j -t news /dev/hdb3
to create the /usr filesystem and started over and all was ok.