Randquist Rants » sparc

RoR on Debian on Sparc

CobyR — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 01:59:29 +0000

Installing Ruby on Rails from Source on a Debian Linux running on a Sun Ultra 5 Workstation, has been an adventure.

Actually getting ruby on – no problem, download, make etc…

Then getting Gems installed so I can install rails… not so easy.

When attempting to run ruby setup.rb for Gems I encountered an error regarding zlib not being installed.

After downloading ruby-zlib-0.6.0 and attempting to run ruby extconf.rb I got back a message saying that it couldn’t create the makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers.

So then I did an apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev.

Then ran ruby extconf.rb – it worked.

Then ran ruby setup.rb in my gems directory – it worked.

Then I ran gem install rails – it worked.

Now I need to get the latest subversion in place and the sparc box is fully ready to go as a RoR development machine.

Ubuntu – Dapper Drake

CobyR — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 04:48:18 +0000

I’ve been playing with my Ultra 5 Workstations again. I decided that with a bit more memory and a current linux current and Gnome or KDE that they would make nice introductory/development machines for my kids. I pulled Debian Sarge R2, which is still using the 2.4.2x Kernl, and got things running smoothly, except when in KDE the B key on the keyboard dies. I thought it was a hardware issue at first, but after playing with three different workstations and three different keyboards it was obvious it has to do with the mappings in KDE, works fine under Gnome.

I wasn’t really happy with using the 2.4.x kernel though, would prefer 2.6.x, so I pulled the latest Ubuntu release for the sparc architecture and have installed that. It’s up and running on one machine, now I’m trying to figure out exactly which packages to install to get the GDM up and running properly.

I installed Dapper in a VPC on Windows box, with minimal problems, had to escape out during the GRUB loader and reconfigure X to use 16 bit color instead of 24 but other than that it went smoothly.

So more on X and Ubuntu on Sparc in the future.

Linux on different architectures

CobyR — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 02:09:01 +0000

Well as I have been spending more and more time on linux, I decided it was time to break out some of the old hardware. I have an SGI Indy, and several Sun Ultra 5 machines, that still have their native OS’s installed. It’s time to move them to Linux, I’ve decided to use debian since there are distros available for both the sparc and mips architectures.

Installed Jigdo and have been downloading ISO’s. Gotta burn them and start installing tomorrow.