Sunblade 100 Installation

[minhtang]

Well, I just finished the Gentoo installation on my SunBlade 100. The 21 inch GDM-5510 monitor is the main incentive for me in pursueing such a task... and oh yeah... Gentoo kicks Solaris ass on this hardware.

But anyway, I just want to mention some problems(some out of many ) that I encountered during the installation. Most of the solutions were found on the forum and bug.gentoo.org but I just want to combine them all here so that if any one planning to do an install of Gentoo on a SunBlade 100 can know what to expect

Problem 1: The Expert 3D Lite Graphic card is currently unsupported. When I boot gentoo of the cd, the machine seems to hang after the "booting linux" message... but in reality, the machine is booting but the Expert 3D Lite card is unable to display the boot process.
Solution: Removing the card and use the onboard 3D Rage XL (isn't it obvious )

Problem 2: After installation of the kernel and rebooting the machine, the OpenBootProm can't load SILO and outputs "The following file doesn't seem to be executable"
Solution: at the ok prompt type boot disk0:x where x is any number from 0-9. To make it permanent, type setenv boot-command boot disk0:x where x is any number from 0 to 9 (assuming that the boot partition is located on /dev/hda ... if I understand correctly )

Problem 3: Installing xfree-4.3.0-r5 will fail due to the declartion of Bool bool in the union structure in the file xf86cfg/loader.h heck... how can a programmer even think of defining a field name Bool bool is out of my comprehension but anyway....
Solution: modified the file and change Bool bool to something like Bool var_bool or Bool bull_shit Oh and one more thing, it's always good to emerge ccache before emerging any big package because if the emerge of the big package failed and you are like me, stupid enough to issue something like emerge --resume xfree, then at least the second emerge is a little faster

Problem 4: Configuring /etc/X11/XF86Config. Since I didn't include the Option "reference_clock" in the XF86Config file under the 3D Rage XL definition, my monitors keep on being out of sync.
Solution: The Sparc FAQ on bugs.gentoo.org mentioned include Option "reference_clock" in the definition of your video card. In my case, it is Option "reference_clock" "29.498MHz"

Problem 5: My USB Type 6 Keyboard keeps on getting wrongly mapped so I can't do a Control+Alt+Backspace in X to exit from X. And my b turns out to be v and some other absurd stuff.
Solution: I declared the XkbRules Option to be"xfree86", the XkbModel Option to be "Sun_Type6".

Problem 6: The most frustrating problem of all. It's really a problem about the case design of the SunBlade... since the case is quite small, everything is cramped. After I have taken the case cover out to remove the Expert 3D Lite card and put the case cover back in, one of my hard disk would not be detected by Gentoo (obviously the IDE cable for it has been troubled by the case cover when I put the case cover back)... So I have to take the cover out again, press the IDE cable and power cable firmly into the disk and put the cover back on again. It tooks me 3 tries before the case cover won't interfere with the hard disks.... Heck, I even think about leaving the case cover open that way

Well yeah, enough blah blah ing... hope some one will find some encouragement from reading this... I almost went mad 2-3 times during the course of installation so if you the installation is getting on your nerve, just relax, you will get past it Ok... now I have to go enjoy my 21 in monitor at 2048x1536 resolution Maybe some porn will do
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Three minutes of thought would suffice to find this out. But then, thought is irksome, and three minutes is a rather long time.
-- A.E. Houseman

[lanfaedhe]

Thanks for posting this - it's been invaluable. For other Gentoo newbies, I'll add this one piece of advice:

1. emerge gcc before you do anything. I was getting errors trying to emerge xfree and eventually it dawned on me that maybe it was a problem with the compiler. Sure enough, it was.