Ultrabook2e Running Fedora


In case you didn’t know i really like SPARC hardware. One of the more exoctic peices of hardware that I own is a Ultrabook2e. It is an older SPARC based laptop the one i have has a 14″ 1024×768 display, 1.5GB ram, 500mhz UltraSparc IIe CPU, 60gb hdd, and dvd rom. It is a neat piece of hardware.

Getting linux running on it. I did the install over serial console since the frame buffer was going crazy. It has a “ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (rev 27)” video card in it, after some experimenting I was able to get the framebuffer and X working. the magic for it was appending “video=atyfb:1024×768@60” to my kernel boot line. im not sure what the kernel was trying to set things to when left to its own devices. Sound worked out of the box as did nearly everything else.

Things not working. the pcmcia slots are not working. dmesg shows

yenta_cardbus 0000:00:03.0: no bus associated! (try 'pci=assign-busses')
yenta_cardbus 0000:00:03.1: no bus associated! (try 'pci=assign-busses')
I tired appending “pci=assign-busses” to the kernel boot line but no luck. I need to look at the module, it probably needs some porting of OFW. I have a prism54 based card that I want to use. The other thing not working is the touchpad and keyboard. I have to use external USB keyboard and mouse. With these issues fixed id be able to give a talk on secondary arches using a secondary arch. Which i think would be cool.


Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.