[TriLUG] SPARC serial console and minicom

[Magnus Hedemark]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Kevin Flanagan wrote:

>   I've been working on a gentoo installation on a SUN Ultra1 that I have
> at home.  Serial cable console is the only way I can go, not having an
> appropiate set of KVM parts. 

Nothing wrong with that; I've got over a dozen sparcs at home easily, 
including your Ultra 1's brothers that came from the same lot.  Not one of 
them has a keyboard/monitor/mouse attached (not for lack of hardware, but 
because it's not needed).  Once the OS is installed, there isn't much need 
for a head on it anyway.

> I have Minicom working just fine, except
> for one thing.  In many places through the installation you really need
> a full screen with proper editing, not just line mode, as well as some
> of the menus don't really work right.  Does anyone know how to set the
> TTY so it'll work right?  Am I missing something really basic?

While I agree that, at times, the installer can look ugly on a serial 
console, with most distros I've been able to get around well enough.  Is 
this just a Gentoo thing?  I've never installed Gentoo on a sparc.

>   Alternately, does anyone know off hand the release schedules for any
> SPARC distros that are pending? I hear that Aurora is due, as well as
> possibly Fedora Core for SPARC.

I think that you're probably talking about the same distro with two names;  
the direction of Aurora seems to be merging with Fedora Core.  Spot has 
been very quiet lately about progress, which I hope means he's busy with 
progress on it rather than disinterested.

OpenBSD of course runs *great* on sparcs.  It's worth a look as well.

I've installed Debian on sparcs a few times and just didn't see the point.  
I don't know if it is just a debian on sparc thing or if debian in general 
is supposed to be such a pain in the butt to install and use.