Re: Debian "wheezy" install on Netra X1 done

On 9/3/25 17:13, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi Dennis,
...
>> NOTE : do a full power off and cool down before booting
> 
> OK, thanks.
> 

That is merely because the POST firmware process will flush all the
memory during the test phase.


>> Now that the box runs an old old Debian version is there a path to
>> upgrade using some apt sources stuff ?
> 
> Not really. Wheezy is ancient and trying to upgrade that to unstable
> will just horribly fail, in particular since you also will have to
> switch architectures in between.

Yikes. Well, lets not do that.

> 
>> The objective is to get to a reasonable state wherein I can
>> fetch build-essential stuff and apply the kernel patches.
> 
> You don't need to apply any patches, just install the test kernel:
> 
> https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/sparc64/linux-image-6.12.3-sparc64-smp_6.12.3-1+sparc64_sparc64.deb
> 

During the install I went with the non-SMP kernel simply because the
machine is, well to be frank, a single CPU machine. The SMP kernel would
just introduce a new variable. Regardless I will install that package
and then reboot. Hope hope hope that it does reboot ... but wait!? There
is no GRUB2 with wheezy. Only SILO. So how does one select a kernel to
boot with SILO? I guess I have to look into that.

> If you want to upgrade the machine to unstable, I would just recommend
> using debootstrap to create a sparc64 chroot on that machine on a second
> disk and then extract the kernel package above and install the kernel,
> then boot it with the correct root filesystem.
> 
> # debootstrap --no-check-gpg --arch=sparc64 unstable sparc64-chroot \
>                --include=debian-ports-archive-keyring \
>                http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports
> 

This is precisely why I was careful to have two disks in that little
machine. Perfect. I shall try that approach and see what I get.