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Setting up the SPARC IPX with Debian Woody took some time. I never managed to do a succesfull netboot, and the floppydrive was dead. But I have a Sparc Ultra 1 that came to the rescue. After taking off the lids of both machines I crosswired the working floppydrive of the Ultra 1 with the IPX. Power for the drive came from the Ultra 1. This was easier than taking out the drive and putting it in the IPX, at least I didn’t have the patience to get the drive out, it was mounted rock solid. Some pictures of this are here. After this I booted off a Debian install floppy and the install from there was pretty straightforward. The partition holding the bootloader has to be under 1 GB though, otherwise Silo won’t load. Some time later I had an IPX running Debian Woody. After initial setup an ‘apt-get install apache php4’ and some other things provided me with the stuff I needed to set up a server. But there were some quirks. Editing the httpd.conf so the php module is loaded on startup and adding index.php was simple, but then Apache refused to start. After googling around a bit I found the solution here. Apparently some non-i386 architectures need to increase the limit of shared memory. The suggested action to increase it with

echo "33554432" > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

worked fine for me. To make things easier I added a startup script that would automate this on boot. First I created an rc.local with

touch /etc/int.d/rc.local

Chmodded it to 774, and set it up to run at boottime just before Apache is started, with

ln -s /etc/init.d/rc.local /etc/rc2.d/S90local

(Apache is @S91apache in /etc/rc2.d). Then the /etc/init.d/rc.local file was edited to contain the line ‘echo “33554432” > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax’. Thusly I acquired a working Apache + PHP4 on my IPX.

Note: I just got a bigger HD and an external CD-rom, which made installing Linux on this machine a breeze; I just popped in the Debian CD, typed ‘boot cdrom’ and sat back. This was about the most uneventful install I ever did, and some time later I had a fresh Debian system on a 4.3 GB Seagate HD. After the system was rebooted I configured & installed some more stuff again as described above. Now this machine runs fine as a webserver, with no monitor and keyboard attached. Update: The IPX froze every couple of days and I suspected it was a kernel thing. Strange, on a standard install. Upgrading to a kernel from unstable or testing didn’t help, and compiling my own kernel failed, but then I found a home-made 2.4.23 kernel and the system has been working like a charm ever since I installed it. And the little green led at the front now works too

(This stuff is old and is just here for the sake of completeness.)