[SunHELP] SparcStation 5

[Phil Brutsche]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> Hi people,
>             I'm new to the list. I recently scored my self a SparcStation 5
> for a really good price. Only problem is that it doesn't have a floppy or
> cd-rom and doesn't have Solaris installed on it.

:(

> I've been looking into ways to install Solaris onto it by a net install but
> that seems like it might be a bit hard because by the sounds of the
> instructions I need another Solaris machine to be the server for the
> SparcStation to leech from...

Yeppers - you need a Solaris system to netboot Solaris :(

> I was hoping I could just setup a web server on my Linux machine or
> something and point the SparcStation to that...Does anyone have any
> ideas, or know any easier ways to install Solaris on this diskless
> machine.

Buy a Sun-bootable external CD-ROM drive.  Soooo much easier than driving
yourself insane trying to netboot Solaris :)

NetBSD will run like a champ on that SPARC, though, and is very easily
netbooted off Linux.

> I have Solaris 8 for Sparc, but I'm not 100% sure it will work in the
> SparcStation 5 because the minimum memory requirements for Solaris 8 is
> 64meg but my SparcStation only has 32. will Solaris still install? I
> wasn't planning on running a window system, just text console. Does
> anyone know which version of Solaris will install on my SparcStation 5?

Solaris 8 could on the machine, but will not install & run in less than
64MB.  Some sort of hackery may be possible, I'm not sure.  Solaris 7 will
install & run, but slow will be an understatement.

It's much easier to upgrade the memory than to make it work through
hackery - it was so cheap I pushed my SPARC up to 256MB (approx $15 US for
a 32MB stick on eBay).

-- 

Phil