Squeeze installer for sparc is affected by a number of problems, discovered late in the release cycle. In particular:

• #608516: niu network driver is not included in installer udebs.
• #610906: pata_cmd64x driver is not included in installer initrd, CD-ROM and hard drives are not detected on systems which require it as a result.
• #602853: kernel does not boot on machines which need atyfb graphics driver, last message seen on the console is "console [tty0] enabled, bootconsole disabled".

These are documented in Squeeze installation notes, however it would be nice to push available fixes for these bugs into the first point release. In order to test the fixes I've created a couple of unofficial Squeeze installer images for sparc, which can be found here. See the README file for details. If you have a sparc system where install is affected by one of these bugs, it would be great if you could try it out and send a report to debian-sparc or directly to me.

There is also #611314 (sym53c8xx module is not loaded automatically), but we don't know what causes it yet. For now just use a simple workaround described in the bug.