6 May 2012 19:18
6.0_BETA observations
John D. Baker <jdbaker <at> mylinuxisp.com>
2012-05-06 17:18:44 GMT
2012-05-06 17:18:44 GMT
I'm making my first foray into running netbsd-6 on my hoarde of sparc boxes, starting with my "big" workstation (SS5, 110MHz, 256MB, cgsix). Although most of my sparc will use serial console only, a few will have a framebuffer console. Video console handling is much improved over netbsd-5 (where it was basically unusable due to freezing some random time after login). As I was simply updating over a copy of my old netbsd-5 install (NFS), I was glad to see that it "Just Worked"(tm). I did an appreciable amount of work at the console finishing the upgrade and adjusting things. No stuck console. Since wscons is turned on by default now, I set out to finish enabling it on my installation. The result was not what I expected, though. Running '/etc/rc.d/wscons start' handled the default/console/ttyE0 well enough, then three iterations of the following line: wsconscfg: WSDISPLAYIO_ADDSCREEN: Device not configured followed by a line indicating that ttyE4 was added without problems. "Stop-Fn" for "2<n<4" didn't do anything, but "n=1, n=5" switched to the appropriate console. When the terminals were enabled in /etc/ttys, getty complained similarly that "/dev/ttyE[1-3]" were not configured. I checked that the device files existed (ttyE[0-7], wsfont, wskbd(|[0-3]), wsmouse(|[0-3]), wsmux[0-3], wsmuxctl[0-3]). I running GENERIC, so I expect all the necessary things to be defined there. Any hints to what I'm missing? I tried 'startx' and the server started up, but I couldn't switch consoles with it active. It started 'twm', but I coudln't open an xterm. Exiting the window manager didn't terminate the server, but instead reset it. Guessing that it would behave like its x86 counterparts, I used Control-Alt-Backspace to "Zap" the server. Then I was able to switch consoles again. Right now, the console/X is not as important--I'm using the machine to build packages that will be needed for my other (headless) sparcs via ssh. I would eventually like to get the console/X functional. Thanks for the work put into the sparc port for netbsd-6. -- -- |/"\ John D. Baker, KN5UKS NetBSD Darwin/MacOS X |\ / jdbaker[snail]mylinuxisp[flyspeck]com OpenBSD FreeBSD | X No HTML/proprietary data in email. BSD just sits there and works! |/ \ GPGkeyID: D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4 BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645
RSS Feed