[ale] Linux/Sparc

[Chris Ricker]

Um, not to be rude, but your ISP *is* a major dummy.  For starters, there is
no FreeBSD/Sparc [1] yet!  People are in the beginning stages for a port to
the 32-bit architecture, but that's as far as they've gotten in the 2 years
they've been working on it (and actually, that seems to have become "lets
port to StrongARM instead" last time I popped into their mailing lists ;-)
[2].  You can find the home page for the FreeBSD/Sparc porting project at
<http://www.freebsd.org/~obrien/freebsd-sparc/>.

For Sparcs (32-bit), you have the following choices (not counting
experimental OSes like Spring or Plan 9, and crap like Mach ;-):
SunOS
Solaris
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Linux

For UltraSparcs (64-bit):
Solaris
Linux

To answer the original question, the Linux/Sparc and Linux/Ultrasparc ports
are quite robust and stable.  I've not used the new Debian one, but the RH
distribution is fairly straight-forward.  Just make sure your hardware is
supported first, as not every Sun ever made is.

If you're one of those people who tracks kernels closely, Sparcs can be a a
slight pain as the Sparc tree sometimes gets out of sync with the official
releases from Linus, but that's not been nearly as bad lately as it has in
the past. Besides, that's true of all non-Intel ports of Linux, and most of
the others are much worse....

FWIW, my ISP [3] is currently plotting a switch from Solaris (on Sparc and
UltraSparc hardware) to Debian on the same equipment, for both technical
reasons (Linux is faster and has more features that they want) and
financial reasons (Solaris upgrades ain't cheap, and they'd rather invest
the money in more hardware).

later,
chris

[1] I wonder why Sparc International got all in a tizzy over SparcLinux, but
doesn't regard FreeBSD/Sparc as trademark infringement.  Well, besides the
fact that they've never heard of FreeBSD/Sparc ;-).

[2] That's not intended as a slag on FreeBSD.  I prefer the feel of Linux,
but the *BSDs are fine OSes as well.  FreeBSD's just never had
cross-platform support as a major development goal, and it shows, that's
all.  Their Alpha port is much further along, to the point of actually
being usable....

[3] Xmission.com--far and away the most competent ISP I've ever dealt with,
if you ignore their marketing FUD; their explanation about why they run
Roxen instead of Apache is quite amusing ;-).

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker at genetics.utah.edu


On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Gary Maltzen wrote:

> I bought a copy of RH5.2/Sparc for my ISP; he (no dummy) had some trouble
> with the installation. FWIW, he's currently running FreeBSD on a couple of
> Sparc's, reporting that it seems to have better display support and run
> faster than Linux.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Robert Butera <rbutera at ece.gatech.edu>
> 
> Has anyone here installed Linux on a SPARC?  Any general comments on
> robustness and stability (compared to a PC)?
>