Sun Blade 1000

[radikarlus]

Hi,

I would like to try FreeBSD on my Sparc Sun Blade 1000 workstation. Does anyone have any experience?

Thanks,

[gavin@]

Short answer: You'll need to use CURRENT as FreeBSD 7.1 doesn't support the UltraSparc-III support chips. http://people.freebsd.org/~marius/8.0-20081215-SNAP-sparc64-disc1.iso.gz is an ISO image that should work on the machine.

I've only sed Blade 1000s as servers though, I have no idea if video/sound etc work.

[sossego]

Here is some information on the Sun Blade 1000. Since I am trying Free, Open, and Net on the machines here, a few pointers for others.

Hardware:
If you're using a non-sun keyboard, you may need to do a quick double tap of keys followed by hitting the escape key. This is only necessary in the OpenBoot prompt.

Open Boot necessary commands.
>obdiag
Diagnostics, you'll need it to find the graphics card.
> boot cdrom|disk0|disk1 Install and locations. I don't know how to do a net install from OB.
>setenv output-device /path-to-graphics-card
>setenv output-device screen:rWxHxFrequency
>reset-all
For switching graphics cards and default fb resolution. This is good if you don't have a UPA card.

I'm going to suggest modularly building Xorg from the main site and disabling all extensions- emphasis on dri(2), record, and glx- and modules except what is necessary.