Acquired a sparc ultra5...little advice.

[Codewiz]

I was given a sparc ultra5 workstation. It didn't have a hard drive or cd-rom drive. For the time being, I added a 3gig hard drive and 24x cd-rom drive.

I downloaded and tried to install Solaris 9 but it just gets all sorts of errors and won't install. It scrolls so many errors that I can't even read them before it reboots. I then tried to install Solaris 8 from cd and it won't boot that cd at all.

I have been able to successfully install Suse Linux on the machine.

What do you recommend as a good replacement for Solaris? I am used to Solaris since that is what I did all my programming on for classes in college. Would you go with Linux or BSD? I have never tried BSD but I liked this fact that, "OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most programs from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX."

I know Linux probably has more software available but I will most likely be using this machine either as a server or a machine I use to program java applications on.

Another thing. How do I change the default boot device? Currently it is set to boot off the network. I know I need to press STOP-A and edit something but I don't know what.

 

[Nothinman]

I've heard that some Suns need 'special' CDROM drives that have a 2K sector size instead of the normal 512b. I have an Ultra1 and had no problems installing Solaris 8 with a random external SCSI cdrom. I now run Debian woody on it, tftp booted from the net and did a net install so I didn't need the cdrom or floppy for that =)

Check out the UltraLinux homepage, whether you put Linux on it in the end or not it's a good start to figure out Sun hardware and the OpenProm firmware. Type help at the prompt, the boot device is one of the environment variables.

 

[Sunner]

Your problem seems kinda strange, and it's hard to offer much advice with so little to work with, I suggest you check out docs.sun.com if you wanna try to solve that problem.
I've installed both Solaris 7 and 8 on Ultra5's several times, and haven't ran into any problems, no special CD's required.
Im assuming OpenBoot is properly configured since you can boot Linux CD's, there's nothing special you should need to do to boot and install Solaris, and there shouldn't be any problems with the CD's, unless you burned them in some funny way(I always burn mine using Nero on a Win2K box in the office, default options all the way).

Anyways, IMO your most sensible choice aside from Solaris are NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Debian Linux.
All are relatively well supported on SPARC64, while distros such as SuSE seems to pay less attention to SPARC, and you're less likely to be able to get help from fellow users.
If it were me, it would boil down to OpenBSD or Debian, partly cause I don't have much experience with NetBSD, and partly cause I like OpenBSD's whole philosophy more than the other BSDs.
Now, Debian will have a larger userbase to get help from, and it has more apps, basically it has more of everything.
OpenBSD on the other hand is an extremely robust and spartan system, and the documentation is second to none.
I've also found the OpenBSD community(primarily the mailing lists) to have been more helpful than most others, including the Linux ones, but at the same time, they're not very forgiving if you don't RTFM and so forth.

Try both and see which one you like, they both have pro's and cons, me I run Linux on my workstations, and OpenBSD on stuff such as my firewall, boxes running snort and such things, but I've never ran any of them on an Ultra5 since I run Solaris on those

Oh and to boot from the disk, just get into openboot, and type "boot disk", or "boot cdrom", that's assuming your devaliases are setup correctly.
If you don't know how to do that, don't worry, it's rather straightforward, and help is available by typing "help" in the Openboot prompt.

 

[Codewiz]

I would love to run solaris. Here is the errors I get when I try to install it.

Text

It happens everytime and it just sits there. It is weird because I have burned the cd three times with different software trying to get it to work.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Does Sun offer md5sums of their isos? If so, Id check that out to make sure the iso downloaded correctly.

On the linux vs bsd theme, I would go with OpenBSD because I am an OpenBSD user. But if I was looking for something a little more mature, Id go with Debian. Ultrasparc is a new architecture for OpenBSD.

 

[Sunner]

It's strange that it can't read the CD at first, had you forgotten to insert the CD or anything?
If not, maybe the CD drive is having problems reading the disc.

If you're sure the disc is fine, you could try with another CD drive, and vice versa.

 

[burnedout]

I haven't played with U5s much as SS 10/20/U1/U2. However, this should work to change your OBP settings:

Type all commands without the '

'Stop-A'

You should have an ok prompt.

'printenv' <enter>

Next, the object is to get the OBP boot settings to the basic level for an attended installation.

'setenv auto-boot? false' <enter>
'setenv boot-device disk' <enter>
'setenv mfg-switch? false' <enter>
'setenv diag-switch? false' <enter>
'setenv tpe-link-test? false' <enter>
'reset' <enter>