[geeks] Can I netboot a SPARCclassic from Win95 box?

[Michael Parson]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:06:04AM -0500, geeks at litfire.com wrote:
> Michael Parson said:
>> Arno: I don't know if you've got a CD rom or not in that machine,
>> or if a system of that vintage could boot off it if it did, but I
>> would maybe recommend one of the 'Live CD' distributions of Linux
>> or *BSD, maybe Knoppix Linux.  Boot off it, get it configured with
>> enough stuff to boot your Sun, then get an OS loaded on it.  Once
>> you've got the local OS running on your Sparc, you can reboot your
>> Pentium system back into Windows 95, no harm to the existing OS at
>> all.
>
> Using a live CD, he'd need to put the code he's booting from on a
> floppy or something, since he's doing his development in Windows.

Windows 95, which shouldn't have a filesytem newer than FAT32, which
should be easily readable by any of the modern free UNIX clones.

> He doesn't want to use the disk on the Sparc, and he's trying to
> netboot his own kernel stuff.
>
> Essentially he's just frustrating himself in public instead of mowing
> lawns or shoveling snow or building web pages for hire because he
> prefers to try to figure out how to do things the hard way rather than
> just get the job done.  I can appreciate taking time to pull off a
> cool hack, but nothing involving Windows 95 on a P90 is a cool hack.

That's for sure.  My last P90 was a floppy-booting firewall.  That
eventually got replaced by a Linksys.

>> From his original e-mail on 6/23:
> --
> My main general purpose computer is an original IBM 90MHz Pentium-I
> machine running under Windows 95; I do not intend to change this
> setup and I'd like to use it as my coding/compiling platform for my
> project as well, if at all possible. My testbed will be a Sun 4/15
> SPARCclassic equipped with 40 MB RAM.
>
> In order to ease the coding/compiling/testing cycle, and to avoid
> using the darn noisy yet intact harddisk of the SPARCclassic, I'd need
> to have it boot my images off the developement machine via Ethernet.

Find a quieter hard-drive, it'll save you much pain.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org