[SPARCbook] My Sparcbook3 adventure (Debian X config?) (long)

[Michael Schwarz]

Greetings.  I am new to list, and although I did hunt through the web and 
mailing list archives for FAQ's and messages that touched on my questions, 
I'm sure I've missed material that has been covered here before, so please 
forgive my "newbietude" and bear with me.

A friend of mine gave me an old Sparcbook3 (as far as I can tell, it is a 
plain-old Sparcbook3 with the 50MHz sun4m architecture, the 32M Ram, and 
640x480 display) which he got when a company he worked for went under.  He 
had no passwords, account references, anything.  It has the built-in scsi 
drive (appears to be a 1.x Gig drive), the 10M ethernet (with 10-base-T 
transceiver, thank goodness) and that's it.  No floppy.  No CD-Rom.

I won't bore you with the details, but through network sniffing and 
persistence and some fun with my Linux routing tables, I managed to root the 
box only to find a nearly useless system which had been stripped down to the 
bare minimum needed to support a demo of whatever software this defunct 
company was selling (clearly this was a saleperson's laptop).  (When I 
managed to get the passwd and shadow files off the box and run a cracker on 
them, the root password turned out to be "demo."  The cracker exited so fast, 
I thought it had failed for some reason.)

I had hoped to have a "Solaris/SunOS server" in my "lab," but it had no 
compiler, no man pages, no useful server software of any kind.  I thought 
about cross compiling gcc, but decided if I was going to go to that trouble, 
why not install a different OS?  I then went on to have some fun setting up a 
Lintel box to be a bootp server for Debian GNU/Linux for sparc.  I was pretty 
danged happy when it worked.

So I now have Debian GNU/Linux running on my Sparcbook3 and running well, with 
the exception that X configuration seems to be beyond me.  In poking through 
the archives, I've found the www.nj-onramp.com package of a 2.3.x kernel that 
will support framebuffer and I've seen testimonials that the "X server 
works," but I'm frankly a bit scared to start putting a patched RedHat 6.1 
kernel into my Debian install.

Is there anyone out there experienced in this area who would be willing to 
exchange a few e-mails with me to help me get a working X server up on my 
Debian GNU/Linux based Sparcbook3?  As an incentive, I would write up a FAQ 
or mini-HOWTO which I will post on my web site (www.multitool.org) and offer 
to the Linux Documentation Project, thus perhaps cutting down on the number 
of posts to the mailing list like mine.

Note that I am not bound to Linux.  If one of the *BSDs will install on the 
Sparcbook with the X server working out of the box (and provided they can be 
installed over the net with only a bootp transferred boot image), I would be 
happy to consider those instead.

In any case, I look forward to lurking on the list until I know enough to join 
in!

-- 
Michael Schwarz
http://www.multitool.net
mschwarz at multitool.net