sparc livecd

[Stephen Ward]

Does anyone on the list have any experience building bootable linux livecds
for SPARC?  I've built a customized live cd previously using a Gentoo Howto
[1], but it doesn't translate perfectly into SPARCese.  Specifically, there
comes a point in the Howto where I have to run the mkisofs command, but the
mkisofs man page says I have to use the "-sparc-boot" flag if I want my CD
to be bootable on SPARC.

I've found a README.sparcboot file [2] that indicates I need to grab some
partition files off an existing Solaris CD.  I've done that with a Solaris 7
Server CD and ran mkisofs just as it appears in the README, but I got a
strange error when trying to boot from that CD.  Unfortunately, the error
message escapes me right now, though it wouldn't be too hard to reproduce,
methinks.

I also gave Gentoo's catalyst a shot, but the problem I ran into there I
believe has to do with my portage snapshot basically being too new for my
stage3 file.  I can't build my stage1 without running into a conflict that I
don't know how to resolve (this is my very first experience with catalyst).
Apparently, I have a sparc-gcc package blocking a kgcc package?  Something
like that.  Again, the exact error isn't fresh in my mind.

At any rate, before I waste too much time trying to track down all of the
issues, I thought I'd give a shout out here to see if anyone with experience
can say, "Oh, that's a dead end," or "Have you considered this?", or "I'll
do it for you for $XYZ". :)

Thanks,
Stephen

[1] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_build_a_LiveCD_from_scratch
[2] http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/utils/schilling/cdrecord/README.sparcboot

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