[Lula] Fun installing Ubuntu on sparc ultra 5

[Dan Kegel]

I've had a Sparc Ultra 5 sitting on my desk at home
for the last three or so years.  I'm embarassed
to admit that I never got up the energy to
find a solaris cd-rom to install with.
I figured Sun would require a support contract before
giving me a copy.

But when I cleaned up my office this week,
I saw the old Sparc box and thought, heck,
why not try Ubuntu?  So I downloaded Ubuntu 6.10.

The first installer disc booted, but failed shortly thereafter
with a cryptic "Fast Data Access MMU Miss" error.
A little googling suggested this could be caused by
a bad cd-rom disc.

Thinking that my ancient cd-r burner was at fault,
I tried my wife's.  Her Windows XP system's cd-r burning
program locked up while burning.  I had to reboot her
machine to Ubuntu to get a good burn.

This disc got slightly further, then failed with
a similar error message, "Ilegal Instruction".
Again, googling around found a helpful page,
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/silo/+bug/40119
which said to try setting the default boot device
to cdrom and doing a cold boot.  That worked!

The next problem was my crappy monitor couldn't handle
the video mode the sun's console booted into.
I schlepped various other monitors to my desk until
I found one that worked.

And now I'm happily installing Linux on my ancient Sparc
system (256MB of RAM, 8GB of disk, whee!).
I figure it ought to be useful for testing cross-compilers,
at least... assuming the install goes ok.  I won't know until
morning, 'cause I'm in no mood to lose any more sleep over this :-)
- Dan