I have a sparc machine which has no graphics card installed, therefore it's display runs over the serial console. I also have a Sun keyboard connected through the USB of the Sun. When trying to install gentoo 2005.0 for sparc, the installation program aborts shortly after initialising with the message "Inconsistent console: input 0, output 1". It should be noted that I was trying to do an installation on a V440, which it later turned out that Gentoo doesn't work on anyway. I am however certain the keybooard/serial console display problem will be relevant to other users who have this situation. Probably not relevant to this situation - the "serial console" was a linux laptop computer running minicom. The problem was reproducible also when using a specialist serial console switch from Raritan for switching between multiple machines (its called a KVM switch in german) and the keyboard connected to the Sun. The raritan KVM switch is however unacceptable because of text display problems. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: See problem description Actual Results: See problem description Expected Results: The installation should continue. Sun machines are quite happy to work with such a setup. The Solaris software installs and runs happily with a serial display and an external keybpard connected to the system.
This is a kernel issue, not a Gentoo issue. If you wish to pursue this, I'd suggest you contact the sparclinux mailing list... although I'd suggest looking at the OBP input-device and output-device first, as linux will use those values.
