Sparc - Terminal Emulation

Revision as of 22:06, 21 February 2005

FreeBSD installation on a Sparc machine can be a frustrating thing for the beginner. For starters, you can't use a Sun keyboard, so you must install via serial console. This sounds harder than it is. You need to get a null modem serial cable (available pretty much anywhere for pretty cheap,) and connect another computer (linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD or Microsoft Windows,) and connect it to your server with the serial cable (serial-to-serial; there are usb-to-serial cables around if your "working" computer doesn't have a serial connection.) Once you've done that, use a terminal application that supports the VT100 terminal emulation -- on MS Windows, I prefer TeraTerm (get it here: http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html), but you can user HyperTerm; from Mac OS X you can use the ZTerm application (get it at http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/). Once you've got TeraTerm up and running and your cable connected, you're going to have to check the settings in TeraTerm. Set it to connect via Serial Console port COM1 (or whichever COM your serial cable is on, COM1 will almost always be it,) and then check that your settings reflect 8 bits, No parity and 1 stop bit (abbreviated as 8n1) at 9600baud with hardware set to hardware or Xon/Xoff. Once you've done this, click OK to connect and you will likely be at the OK> prompt. From there, you can type in

OK> boot cdrom

and assuming that your FreeBSD CD is in the drive, it will boot off it.

This is a stub article, inviting comment and tips on how to accomplish a proper console under FreeBSD on Sparc.

The current state of things is a VERY poor console emulation that doesn't seem to do anything beyond the most basic text.

This might be worth linking to from Sparc_-_Install_FreeBSD along with links to cu, tip or other terminal connection programs.