I see this bug is now 183 days old, but I fell into the same trap. Recently, after upgrading to kernel-image-2.6.8-2-sparc64, The keyboard got a wrong layout - pretty much every key know has another meaning. Unfortunately, the the old 2.4 kernel is not bootable (silo has forgotten about it) any more, so I can't do much testing.
I try to rescue that machine in a few days. -- Lukas
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