tlug: Sun SPARC ss2

[Kilian Muster <kilian@example.com>]

Hi there, I've got a technical question concerning the Sun SPARCstation 2.

As some of you might know I've bought one of these machines at a TLUG
auction. It's now equipped with 20 MB RAM, a Floppy drive, a 250 MB HD, an
original SPARC Keyboard and no Graphic card whatsoever. It's connected to the
10 BaseT Ethernet of my company (and from there T1 access to the Internet)
and via serial cable to the serial-/modem-bus of my Macintosh.

There is no system installed yet on the ss2. Furthermore the HD is an old
Apple SCSI disk and still formatted in Apple HFS format. I've downloaded the
installer disk image and written it to a Floppy using rawwrite.exe (via
Virtual PC).

I've never ever used a Sun SPARC machine, so I don't know anything about it,
but I'd like to install Linux on this machine using the bootdisk, then
repartition and format the harddisk and get the rest via FTP from RedHat (As
far as I know there is finally a partitioning utility you can use from the
installer since version 5.1). Since there is no graphic card in the ss2 I'm
using "Z-Term"--a freeware Terminal software--from my Macintosh via the
serial port. When connecting to the ss2, all I get is the following error
message:

FAILURE: No Trap Taken, Exp Trap Type = 00000009

Doesn't say much to me. The keyboard wouldn't accept any input either (from
Z-Term) Any help?

I've only subscribed to tlug-advocacy, so if you answer me, could you be so
kind to send it directly to kilian@example.com ?

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