I have just installed Woody for SPARC on my bog-standard Ultra 1, but i'm having a few problems... my network interface seems to go down, and them come back up intermittently, but even when it says it's back up, my machine is still unpingable, and it has no access to the world beyond it's motherboard. Here's the error i'm getting:

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
eth0: transmit timed out, resetting
eth0: Happy Status 03010000 TX[000003ff:00000301]
eth0: Link is up using internal transceiver at 100Mb/s, Full Duplex

and even after this, i still cannot access my network, or the internet.

I have narrowed this down to a bug in either the hardware, or the driver that Debian uses to interface with the hme (HappyMeal) network cards. I've therefore downloaded 2 patches (i only need to apply one) from the folowing addresses:

- http://sparclinux.net/pub/patches/sunhme-davem.patch

- http://sparclinux.net/pub/patches/U1-hme-lockup.patch

However.... i don't know how to apply these patches! I assume they are kernel patches, but never having touched a kernel, i'm clueless...

any clues ppl??

tryed looking for a newser stock kernel in the debian ftp sites,
I'm sure 2.4.19 is about he place do and "apt-get update" and then "apt-cache search kernel | less"
then look foro kernel-2.4.x that sould find it if it is there

Hang on a minute, you work at Sun don't you?

Therefore you should know everything about Sun ultras.... :P

ok, i found 2 things of interest:

- kernel-image-2.4.19-sun4u - Linux kernel binary image for UltraSPARC (sun4u) systems.

- kernel-patch-ethernet-drivers - patches with drivers for ethernet cards

I'm already running the 2.4.18 kernel, so is upgrading really worth it? this is a known bug, and there is a known patch for it, so i'm not sure upgrading the kernel to .19 from .18 will help...

However, the 'kernel-patch-ethernet-drivers' package looks promising.... so i'm installing it now..... i'll post the outcome when i know it :D

Guys, have had limited success with debian on my Blade 1000 the main problem being I could never get a SunType6 USB keyboard to work properly in X :(

In reply to you Q:

apt-get install aptitude
...will save you the pain of dselect or endless screenfulls of grepped garbage from apt-cache search

You need the kernel-source package corresponding to a version supported by the patch.
Also grab the corresponding source package for kernel-image* for the same version (apt-get source kernel-ima...) it gets dumped in the current directory. Look in the archive for the config file matching your machine, (not sure how this is arrange on SPARC distro) and copy it somewhere safe

Kernel source is in /usr/src... ungz, tar and create symlink /usr/src/linux
Copy config file to /usr/src/linux/.config

Apply patch as per instructions
run make-kpkg to create a debian package from the built source (read the man page)

dpkg -i package.dep to install

thanks for the info.... i'm gonna try all that when i get a chance.

as for aptitude... isn't that the X-based GUI for apt?? if so... why on earth would i ever want to use that?!?!? :blink:

i'm using a remote SSH session, usually from mongoose on my LAN, but sometimes from other random machines, so it's not really console-based, but it's effectively the same.