I have got this working on Debian SPARC v4r0. I took the OpenACS v5.1 source build provided above and simply rebuilt it on my Debian SPARC machine. Of course all the other dependencies were installed first:-
apt-get install postgresql postgresql-dev postgresql-doc
apt-get install aolserver4 aolserver4-nspostgres aolserver4-nssha1 aolserver4-nscache tdom
Then install the package:-
dpkg -i openacs-5-1_5.1.5-1_sparc.deb
Seems to be working ok.
One potential pitfall as stated elsewhere is on Debian this is not managed by daemontools, but standard init.d. So when the installer says it's restarting, you will need to run ...
/etc/init.d/openacs-5-1 restart
... and wait.
I have not done extensive testing. I have installed the "Automated Testing" package and run system test cases for package acs-tcl, category api, seemed to be ok. Any other suggestions?