installing via tftp images?

soellman · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2005 Posts: 3

I have a Netra T1 (old) with no cd drive, and so I wanted to tftp a gentoo image in order to install gentoo. I've been using the April 13th sparc64 image, and it tftps and boots just fine, but the ramfs partition doesn't seem to allow me to write anything, which prevents me from even putting my nameserver info in /etc/resolv.conf.

I couldn't find a doc on how to install after booting from the tftp image, I was just going to try and progress as per the cd install docs and try to muddle through stage1, but is this something which is even possible with the current state of affairs?

If I don't currently have a Gentoo/Sparc machine, is it possible for me to build another tftp image which has a larger ramfs size so that I can write to it (it is indeed mounted rw, but it's 100% full)? I have solaris and gentoo/x86 machines.

cheers,
-o

Weeve · Retired Dev Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 641

I've rolled a new tftpboot image to fix this (and upgraded to kernel 2.4.31) which is available from http://dev.gentoo.org/~weeve/tftpboot/images/gentoo-sparc64-2005.0-20050717.tftpboot

soellman · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2005 Posts: 3

soellman · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2005 Posts: 3

Comments - the tftp image doesn't have links2 or lynx, so the install instructions don't quite work at that point. I just used wget and my local browser to find the URL but some might get stuck, although I suppose those who might get stuck probably aren't using gentoo/sparc.

The sparc install instructions also don't mention to disable keymaps and userfont if you don't have a graphics card. I still haven't figured out how to enable getty on the serial console (haven't really tried yet) but that's not a showstopper if I can boot via tftp and chroot if I need single-user non-network access. LOM on the netra is nice too.

cheers,
-o