{"id":1072,"date":"2010-11-19T18:46:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T00:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icesquare.com\/wordpress\/?p=1072"},"modified":"2012-08-14T18:10:35","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T23:10:35","slug":"installing-freebsd-on-sun-blade-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icesquare.com\/wordpress\/installing-freebsd-on-sun-blade-100\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Install FreeBSD on Sun Blade 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I received a Sun Blade 100 as a gift. After doing some research on which OS is the best for this machine<\/a>, I decide to go with FreeBSD. So, my journey with Sun began here.<\/p>\n

I only used Sun\/Solaris in my engineering courses in college, I don’t have much experience with Sun hardware. I assumed that the experience should be similar – I was wrong.<\/p>\n

So, here is what I have: A Sun Blade 100 connected with a regular USB PC keyboard. Note that Sun comes with its own keyboard, which has additional keys like STOP.<\/p>\n

Anyway, after downloading the image of FreeBSD 8.1 Sparc64 and burning it into a DVD (You can burn it on any OS), I tried to boot the machine from DVD (Note that Sun Blade was release in 2002. You may need to verify that it is a DVD reader. You can replace the CD reader by any IDE DVD reader if needed.). And I received the following error messages:<\/p>\n

\r\nBoot device: net  File and args:\r\nTimeout waiting for ARP\/RARP packet\r\nTimeout waiting for ARP\/RARP packet\r\nTimeout waiting for ARP\/RARP packet\r\nTimeout waiting for ARP\/RARP packet\r\nTimeout waiting for ARP\/RARP packet\r\n<\/pre>\n
Apparently, this machine does not know how to boot from CD\/DVD automatically. After reading 20 posts, I finally got a solution:<\/p>\n
If you have a Sun Keyboard:
\n1.) Push the power button to turn on the machine
\n2.) Pressing STOP and A key together<\/p>\n
Otherwise:
\n1.) Push the power button to turn on the machine
\n2.) After the beeping sound, push the power button twice in a short time.<\/p>\n
After trying it for few times, I finally got into the OpenBoot:<\/p>\n
\r\nAborting auto-boot sequence.\r\nok\r\n<\/pre>\n
So, I want to boot from CD:<\/p>\n
\r\nboot cdrom\r\n<\/pre>\n
That’s it. The installation of FreeBSD on Sun is pretty much the same as on PC, except that the color of the installation menu looks a little bit weird.<\/p>\n
If you experience any difficulties on booting from CD, make sure that both harddrive and DVD drive are jumpered to Cable Select, also you can verify the connections by running this command in the OpenBoot:<\/p>\n
\r\nprobe-ide\r\n<\/pre>\n
which will return something like:<\/p>\n
\r\nDevice 0 (Primary Master)\r\n   ATA Mode: XXX\r\nDevice 1 (Primary Slave)\r\n   Removeable ATAPI Model: YYY\r\n<\/pre>\n
Now you can install FreeBSD on your sparc64 machine!<\/p>\n
Few things I’ve learned from running FreeBSD on Sun Machine (Sparc64)<\/h3>\n