Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes. Is there X support? That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port. (Trying to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an emulated tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl. OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great, but I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format. This is heck-of retro :)
thx jake On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 2:22 PM, Peter Tribble <[email protected]> wrote: > > Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed > > machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd. > > > > SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10 > > Memory size: 256 Megabytes > > > > That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI > (any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros. > > You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix. > > http://www.opensxce.org/ > http://www.tribblix.org/download.html > > Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be > honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most > of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE > text iso. > > The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that > small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix > iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory - > you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't > know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is, > but it's likely to be pretty similar.) > > This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive > ends up being pretty large because it has support for > everything in it by default, and it should be possible to > produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive. > One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint > configurations, so doing that (and any other work to > improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my > agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult > for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc > hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think > I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M, > but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.) > > Another way would be to use the existing OS to install > a newer distro in an alternate boot environment. > > In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount > of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of > illumos users working on sparc is pretty small. > > -- > -Peter Tribble > http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ > _______________________________________________ > openindiana-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
