[English Guy]

I am running into a problem trying to install Red Hat 7.2 onto a Sun Ultra 10 (UltraSPARC IIi 333mhz). Basically, I do not have the password to get into the machine, so I am trying to wipe it clean and re-install Linux.
I press the 'stop + A' key, and type 'boot cdrom' with the RH Disk 1 in the CD drive, but it keeps saying 'can't open boot device'.
Does this mean the CDROM drive is bad? (All CD lights flash when I inset the disk)

[stnwerks]

English Guy

Is the cd rom the boot device? I'm not familiar with SPARC but suonds like it wants a floppy. But then I don't even know if SPARC has floppy. I had to go into bios and set cd rom as boot device.
hope this was helpful Steve

[cpuhack.com]

I didn't know you could run linux on a sparc...thought they needed solaris. ;-)

But, I don't recall how exactly to boot to a CD on that machine...may need to contact Sun to determine how. The CD-ROM is SCSI, so, you'll need the SCSI BIOS to load first before you attempt to boot the disc.

-Adam

[English Guy]

I figured it out eventually. SPARCs read binary different than an intel platform, which is what RH7.2 is written for. This is why I was getting the error message. I went to http://linuxiso.org, and downloaded SuSE Linux SPARC 7.3, which worked great!!

Thanks anyway though.

[cpuhack.com]

Thanks for sharing the answer on this one...I learned something new! ;-)