Installation on Ultra 5

The following guide covers the initiation of an installation of FreeBSD on the Sun Microsystems' Ultra 5 platform. This should be suitable for the Ultra 10 platform, a faster and improved variant of the Ultra 5. It does not cover the entire installation, which is similar to an installation of FreeBSD of i386 or AMD. It simply covers the starting of the installer to the point of similarity.

Pre-requisites

The specific SPARC-based installation media must be downloaded (or purchased through one of the affiliated on-line stores) - the i386 and AMD64-based installation media will not work! If using the ports system only CD1 is required for the base system installation.

Since the Ultra 5 uses the OpenBoot system to initiate system start-up, the equivalent of the ubiquitous PC BIOS, accessing it is different to what you may be used to coming from the PC world. Upon starting up and viewing the white boot screen (featuring the Sun classic logo and various system details) the key combination 'Stop' and the letter 'A' must be pressed together. This results in a prompt that simply states: "ok".

This allows commands to be typed that control the system's start-up. For example, typing "probe-ide" and pressing enter will reveal the devices attached to the IDE ports. Typically one hard drive and a CD-ROM will be revealed though that is dependant on the installed hardware.

Initiating the FreeBSD installer

With the OpenBoot system in command mode (see above how to interrupt system start-up) and the FreeBSD for SPARC installation cd-rom in the drive, type the following command to begin the process:

ok boot cdrom /boot/loader       (press Enter)

Note: The ok above is the command prompt, so enter only the part in bold-type.

Installing FreeBSD

After a short while with lots of information scrolling across the screen the familiar Country Selection page appears. From this point the installation becomes the same as an i386 or AMD64-based installation.

Please refer to this guide for continued installation instructions.